David Goodwin

Last night John Pinner gave a talk at SBLug covering Search Engine Optimisation.

Here is an exceedingly random collection of points, as a collective, we came up with.

• The obvious - give your documents structure and use html tags appropriately - Use titles, headings, alt text, link titles.
• It helps if keywords appear in the domain name or URL
• You can overstuff content with keywords, which will have a negative effect
• The longer a title/url etc, the less weight keywords within it will probably have
• Use a robots.txt file, and make sure this links through to a sitemap.xml type file
• Use mod_rewrite (or whatever) where possible to have static looking URLs where possible
• A new site effectively gets sandboxed for the first few weeks/months - over time it will get 'trusted' more, and any new changes will appear quicker. Google may trust domains which are registered for a long period more>
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• If you're devious, you can add keywords into e.g. <noscript> tags, which the search engines may incorrectly pick up on
• You need to consider what people are searching for, and answer their queries - not your own ego. For example, there's probably little point in saying what a great holiday place you are - instead you should probably be using sentences that match what people are looking for - e.g. French Cooking holiday
• Try and make valid [x]html pages... see the w3 validator
• Sometimes Google will use your meta description tag, sometimes it will take a chunk of text out of the page body.
• Try and get links to your site - but ideally they need to be relevant (e.g. from the same industry sector) - e.g get python.org to link to your python training page(s)
• Get entries in dmoz.org / google local / wikipedia ?
• Do Linux like things get a better rating?
• There are other search engines out there - dogpile, snap, msn, yahoo, ask - they are all slightly different, and worth keeping an eye on as google may not be dominant forever
• Ideally find out what your potential customers would search for - this may not be keywords/phrases you're using
• Remember Google.co.uk will return different results from google.co.fr! Server location matters.
• Use the various Google webmaster tools - e.g analytics, webmaster tools, adwords (if you have spare cash!) etc
• Google have released an SEO guide of their own - this pdf

That is all...

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