Four SEO Tips to Help You Think Like Google
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Put the term “SEO tips” into Google’s search box and the leading search engine helpfully returns 12.8 million hits. That’s way too many for one person to digest. If you’re looking for a smaller assortment of tricks for getting to the top of the search engine results pages, keep reading.
Before I go any further, I just want to make it clear that I make no claims to comprehensiveness. And I don’t practice SEO myself; I read about it a lot, and as a writer and editor I think (unconsciously) about SEO whenever I write and/or title an article. That disclaimer out of the way, I’ve found that a lot of SEO seems to boil down to common sense, once you understand how search engines “think.” In the tips that follow, which I’ve culled from around the web, I’m going to try to focus on the ones that seem to highlight this aspect of SEO.
Speak Google’s Language
Google knows all sorts of languages, from spoken to written to programming. It’s been said that Google can crawl any language; it can even crawl Flash and JavaScript these days. Well, that’s not exactly true. Just because Google can crawl your page doesn’t mean that you’re getting the most out of it that you can.
A blog entry on 1st Search Engine Rankings illustrates this point. The author talks about starting a forum which was set up with dynamic PHP URLs. If you have ever wondered what a dynamic URL is, it usually features lots of “?” and “=” in part because the page is being constructed – that is, certain elements are drawn from a database. There’s nothing wrong with that, and a lot of good reasons to have a web site set up with a database in this way. But it’s not search engine friendly; it isn’t immediately obvious from the URL what your page is about.
The blog entry goes on to say that they set up a modification which turned the URLs into static-looking HTML. URLs for threads would say something like “google-discussion.htm” instead of “showthread.php?t=12345678.” After they installed the mod, they began to “see an increase in both indexed pages and searches which ended in a forum page result.” So if you want to see your traffic increase, set up your URLs so that search engines (and site visitors) are reading real words instead of gibberish.
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