Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines by the un-paid (organic or algorithmic) search results. The more your website is highly ranked or the more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence. As you have noticed i use the acronym SEO which simply means search engine optimization so do not be confused when I use SEO.
Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines and Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, these are what search engines use to rank websites.
DESIGN AND CONTENT GUIDELINESS
• Create a useful, content-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Make a site with a clear chain of command and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The search engine crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your title elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages, be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
TECHNICAL GUIDELINES
• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behaviour, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
Quality guidelines - basic principles
• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or Page Rank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighbourhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our rules of search engine.
Other Quality guiding principle
• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behaviour, such as phishing or installing viruses, Trojans, or other malware.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
Browser compatibility
Users typically view your website using a browser. Each browser interprets your website code in a slightly different manner, which means that it may appear differently to visitors using different browsers. In general, you should avoid relying on browser specific behaviour, such as relying on a browser to correctly detect a content-type or encoding when you did not specify one. In addition, there are some steps you can take to make sure your site doesn't behave in unexpected ways.
Test your site in as many browsers as possible, once you've created your web design, you should review your site's appearance and functionality on multiple browsers to make sure that all your visitors are getting the experience you worked so hard to design. Ideally, you should start testing as early in your site development process as possible. Different browsers and even different versions of the same browser can see your site differently.
Write good, clean HTML
While your site may appear correctly in some browsers even if your HTML is not valid, there's no guarantee that it will appear correctly in all browsers - or in all future browsers. The best way to make sure that your page looks the same in all browsers is to write your page using valid HTML and CSS, and then test it in as many browsers as possible. Clean, valid HTML is a good insurance policy, and using CSS separates presentation from content, and can help pages render and load faster
Specify your character encoding
To help browsers render the text on your page, you should always specify an encoding for your document. This encoding should appear at the top of the document as some browsers won't recognize charset declarations that appear deep in the document.
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