[arnold666]

hello,

I'd appreciate any hints or tips on website optimisation.
I understand about meta tags and links to my site, but are there any other areas that I should be looking at.

regards

Arnold

[tomdkat]

Are you talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Or are you talking about tips to make your site load faster, etc?

Peace...

[arnold666]

Originally Posted by tomdkat

Are you talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Or are you talking about tips to make your site load faster, etc?

Peace...

Search engine optimization

[tomdkat]

Ok, there has been plenty of discussion here on SEO so I would suggest searching this forum for "SEO" and read the comments in those threads. If you still have any questions after reading those threads, post them here. There has been some EXCELLENT SEO discussion here in the past so those threads should answer all your questions.

Peace...

[Mudley]

1. design your site for the user, not for the crawler
2. don't use flash
3. don't use frames
4. don't use graphical navigation (use text links)
5. don't rely on a dhtml menu (duplicate deep links in subsection content or subnav)
6. content is king. have good content, and keep it well organized and updated. sites with frequent updates get crawled more frequently and are more likely to get a higher pagerank.
7. don't steal content.
8. have expanded keyword density. Use variations and synonyms of keywords instead of using the same keyword 20 times on a single page.
9. every page should have a unique title, and unique meta description (as well as unique content)
10. don't try to hide additional keywords in invisible text
11. don't stuff your urls with long keyword rich rewrites (http://www.domain.com/everyone-loves...-important-but -many-people-over-do-it)
12. url parameters aren't nearly as bad as frames or flash, but why use ?param=value when you can use domain.com/valuable-keyword/
13. links are important. but don't buy them in bulk, and don't spam
14. have a sitemap (xml)
15. have a google webmaster account, and have your site validated and your sitemap submitted to your google webmaster account. pay attention to any crawl errors or warnings.
16. have a robots.txt and make sure that its configured properly. Accidently blocking a crawler can be a fatal mistake.

That should get you by for a month or two.
Let me know when you want some more.

[jetskiracer]

Hi Mudley,

The company I work for paid a guy to redo our website and I have a couple questions if you dont mind answering them...

What does that term you keep using "crawler"? Is that like the same thing as an internet surfer? I dont think so but just thought I would take a wild guess.

I was told flash is not good becuase seach engines can not read that format but is it still ok to have a flash intro page? Or a small flash banner on the home page? but the rest of it is HTML?

All this is overhelming to me. Do you do website optimization for a living? You sound like you know your stuff. Any advice you can give me on what we have so far would be fantastic. www.interdatarecovery.com Our old site is www.interdata-services.com so you can compare. (A lot of the home page links dont work yet becuase we have not created content for them yet.)

Thank you!
Jetskiracer

[Mudley]

yes, seo is what i do.

crawler is the bot that comes to your site and captures all the data to build the search index

flash cannot be read by search engines, so anything important or useful should not be in flash (and if its not important or useful, it doesn't really need to be there)
Small flash banners are ok.

[arnold666]

thanks for sharing your knowledge, you are correct- this will keep me busy for some time.
btw- I always come to techguy with my queries/problems ( computer related ones that is) and the advice has always been reliable, authorotive and quick.
thanks again for all your guidance

Arnold

[jetskiracer]

Mudley,

How would someone get in contact with you to inquire about your services? I would imagine you have a website of your own I can visit?
Last time I looked into this several years ago the fees that some of these SEO companies were charging 2K to 3K a month with little or no guarantees of page ranking. I am curious what those fees are now a days.

Thanks for your help!

Sincerely.....