As one of our new ‘informative’ blog segments, Daniel Chung presents an easy to follow breakdown of SEO tips. MaxGen Media actively employ all of these techniques when developing a Website.

Provide good digital content and services to your visitors

This is the most important part of SEO. Good content will not only increase your search engine ranking, but also give people the intention to make a link to your Website, because your Website is worthy to be recommended by other Website owners.
However, some SEO companies will introduce “cheat” SEO tactics to their customers. For example, they may put a lot of “hot” keywords on the Website and make text colour the same as background so it is invisible to your Website visitors, but still visible to search engines. Most search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) are very aware of this, therefore the “cheat” action will result in lowering your search ranking, or even completely taking your site off search results.

Keep “ONE” domain name

You may have more than one domain name to your website, for instance, “yourwebsite.com” and “yourwebsite.co.nz”, but don’t submit both your domain names to search engines as they will treat these 2 domain names different Websites, even if it points to the same Website. Because people will visit your website from two different links, it will result in a failing to centralise your Website visitors, and the result will benefit nothing to your search engine ranking.

Focus your keywords

When you define your Website keywords, remember to Focus them. For example, if you are running a car dealer Website, you may use following terms to express your keyword “car” – “quality car”, “best car”, “budget car”, “cheap car”, etc. Doing this will not only confuse search engines, but also confuse your customers. So choose “one” keyword (in this case, lets choose “cheap car”) and make use of this keyword across the whole site.

Prepare a text version of your Website

Some people like “fully animated” Websites, which is very attractive and can impress your customers. However, not all search engines cannot dig through the content inside the animation, so it will result search engines treating your Website as an empty, and of course gaining no ranking.

If you do need a fully animated Website, also prepare a text version of it. See http://www.hms.harvard.edu/dcp/, they use Flash for their Website, but also place a link on top to which directs to a text version of the Website. In this case, search engines still be able to index all their content, while still maintaining the Flash animations.

Use “robots.txt” and robots META

• Place a “robots.txt”on your website root. It can tell how search engines dig through your Website.
• Place a “<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”ALL”> in head section of your website page. This will tell search engine dig through all your content, so no pages will be missed out.

Do not link to/with “bad” or ”unknown” Websites

There are a lots of “link farm” Websites, which allows you exchange links with all their members. Beware of this because you never know who will link to you, and who you link to, and it will affect your search engine ranking if you link to a lot of bad-quality Websites.

Submit your Website to directories and search engines:

• Submit your Website to ODP-DMOZ: http://www.dmoz.org/
• Submit your Website to Google: http://www.google.co.nz/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• Submit your Website to Xtra!Yahoo: http://nz.search.yahoo.com/freesubmit/submit
• Advertise on FINDA: http://www.finda.co.nz/advertise-for-free/

Clean up your Website

• Make your Webpage file name related to the content
• Use CSS to define all your website layout / colour / fonts / etc.
• Make Javascript external links
• Make your Webpage less than 100k in size (not including picture/music, etc)
• Have no more than 100 links on each single page
• Create a sitemap page. It’s good for search engines to find all your Webpages
• Place most important keywords on your web browser title
• Place keywords in meta-tag keyword section (no more than 100 characters)

At MaxGen Media, we follow all search engine optimisation technologies to ensure your website is search engine friendly and can be easily found by your potential customers. Hope you enjoyed this overview of SEO. I’ll be posting more in the coming weeks.

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