Web Development - Optimizing for Modern Search Engines

1. Congruence between title, keywords, and text  => to get higher ranking with google search engine

2. Google also brought the notion of page rank

3. Another thing you can and should do is to submit your site to google -> this is free and easy to do

4. Other things you can do:   xml-sitemaps.com   (get a sitemap) -> will generate a xml file, then you put that in the root of your site, then you tell google this is where your sitemap is , then google not only knows your site is here, it also knows you have a site map and it knows about the architecture of your site

5. Having links from other sites to your site improves your ranking in Google search

6. The number of clicks does not improve your search ranking
7. Have keywords, then have those same words appear in the following paragraphs, and also if the URL has the same word in it  => this would also help your ranking

8. The Google bot cannot see images or color etc. , it can only see text  (this is another reason why having "alternative text" (alt tag) with your images is very important)

9. The bot sees any text, regardless of font  (some people cliam that bots only recognize Ariel and Times Roman?)

10. Header text is more important than the body text (this is suspected by some people, and some experiments suggest this may be the case, but Google would not confirm this)

11. Anchor Text - don't just use "click here" as your anchor text, having descripttive anchor text improve your ranking (this, again, is suspected by some people, but not confirmed by Google)

12. Sprinkle words that match your keywords and words in your header into your introductory paragraphs


13. Phrases vs individual words might make a difference (a lot of discussion about this) (having phrases might be better)

14. "Free" is another "good" term
15. Some people beleive that about 70% of Google's search algorithm is still about links

16. Superpages.com -> Link to your site using things like "online yellow pages" (like the one above)

17. Yelp -> also allows you to fill in a page of information about your business (site) free of charge

18. "Yahoo Locals" also have information pages that you can fill out free of charge

19. There is also  citysearch.com

20. A living site that changes and updates content frequently fares better with Google search bots

21. Re-submit site map? -> only after big, architectural changes

22. Google considering pages to be "duplicate pages" can be a problem

23. Changing the name of pages is bad



SEO Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

Web Development - how search is performed

Alta Vista originally searched and found web pages by looking in the metadata



Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

Web Development - Interesting Site

waybackmachine.org


tis site stores cached versions of past websites

for exaple, you can find an old Alta Vista search page.....etc......



Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

Web Development - the .htaccess file

the  .htaccess   file is usually a hidden file  (you need to unhide system files to be able to see it )

.htaccess file can redirect, etc ........

SEO Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

Web Development - Upload PDF files and get CSS layouts automatically generated for you

Psd2cssonline.com

"Sitegrinder" application does the same thing, but as a desktop application



Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

Dreamweaver - where images are inserted

Foreground images are inserted directly onto the page.

Background images are placed using CSS.

The difference between the two senarios should be noted.

Dreamweaver - Change the background color for the "body" portion of the page

go to "window" -> "CSS styles"

click "All" to switch from "Current" mode
(All mode displays all the CSS Styles associated with the current page)

Expand the <Style> entry in the All Rules pane (click the + button)

select body and click Edit Rule (the "pencil icon" at the bottom of the CSS Styles panel)

when the CSS Rule defineition for "body" dialog box appears, select the Background category

then, click the BAckground color box to open the color pixer

then, use the eyedropper to select a color in the color pixer

***Note:  brackets ("<  >") indicate that a CSS style in internal to the document. If a style is external to a document it would show as someting like  "charliestyles.css" in the CSS styles panel.


Reference: "Adobe Dreamweaver Classroom in a Book"