[Re]Encoded.com

Maximize your website’s exposure

By Justin Bezanson

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that is thrown around a lot. In fact, SEO is becoming a career which makes sense when you see how many poorly designed and marketed sites are out there.

SEO is a topic of heated debate among some designers and marketers which has introduced terms like whitehat (good SEO) and blackhat (bad SEO).

Stop right there. Whatever you have heard about SEO in the past…forget it! If you’ve never heard of it…good. I am going to tell you what you need to know in order to design a site that has good markup and tops the search engine results.

The foundation

First off you need to lay a good foundation to get the maximum out of your efforts. This foundation is your markup (HTML). There are a couple basic principles to follow when writing your code that will do you some favors when your site is indexed by search engines.

1) HTML is for structure…period! So throw out your font tags and stop with the inline CSS. The simpiler you can make the HTML the better.

Avoid using tables whenever possible. Tables can make it hard to place the most important content near the top of the markup (this does matter)

2) Use CSS to style your content. Defining classes in external CSS files will improve your HTML and actually help your site to load faster as external files are usually cached but the browser.

3) Use tags properly. This may sound simple but it can pay off big time. Simply put, use <p> for paragraphs, use header tags for page headers (<h1> for the title of the page and so on), use <ul> and <ol> for lists. This let’s search engines know what your data is and determine how to index it properly.

4) Avoid plugins. Using plugins like Flash to display content is not good for SEO. There are ways around it but that is beyond the scope of this post. For example having a fancy navigation menu in Flash may look nice but will hinder search engines from navigating your site because they don’t understand Flash very well. The same goes for JavaScript navigation.

Building the house

Now that you have your foundation laid you can begin to build your house. Content is the meat of your website and essentially the reason your website exists. If you don’t spend much time creating high quality content you are shooting your website in the foot. By taking time to write good quality content that contains the keywords you want to rank for in search engines you are giving your website a big advantage. Providing good, relevant content to your keywords is critical to ranking good for those keywords.

Beyond good content you need to make sure you define the <title> in your markup and add in some relavent keywords too. Search engines give a lot of weight to your title. Meta keywords and descriptions are not as important as they used to be but it is still a good idea to fill them in.

Making the neighbors jealous

Now that your house is built you need to make it stand out. Probably the hugest factor in getting good search engine rankings is how many other websites link to yours. Quality of those sites also matters. Links from high ranking sites carry more weight then smaller, less known sites.

There are many strategies out there to get links. This is an area where it is easy to ruin your site if you don’t know what you are doing. I already said not all links are created equal, in fact, links for sites that search engines have marked as spam, blackhat, link sellers, etc. can bring negative results to your site.

Here are a couple of ways to get links that may get you into trouble.

1) Link selling. Search engines are cracking down on link selling. High ranking sites make a lot of money selling links to other sites that want to improve their rankings. If the seller or the buyer is suspected of being involved in link selling it can result in search result penalties for both websites.

2) Article directories. Another technique to get links is submitting articles to article directories that let other websites freely republish your articles. If you place a link to your site in the article then you can get a lot of links. Search engines don’t like this practice either as it litters the internet with duplicate content. This can also result in lower search rankings.

Search engines consider these two tactics as attempts to manipulate their ranking system and penalize websites that are discovered to use these tactics.

Here are a couple ways to get links that are considered natural and accepted by search engines.

1) Good content. Wait I said that already. Yes, if you write good content then you will get links to that content. It is almost a scientific law. If people like your content they will link to it.

2) Guest Posts. It can, however, be hard to get people to see that good content at first. A good way to get some eyes on your content is to write guest posts for related blogs. Try and find popular blogs in your niche and make sure you provide your very best work and include a link to your website. This will get your name out there and get people reading your website.

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