This time, I’ll write about SEO, i.e. Search Engine Optimization.
First of all let’s agree on one point, we should build websites for people, not bots, but people find us through bots.
So keeping in mind to build “useful and good content“, let’s see how a bot sees your website?
First of all, for some people who are completely new to the topic, a bot is a kinda program (or software) used by search engines to browse the Internet and saves all the information it can read in the search engine’s index, and bots, basically are Text Browsers, and they read your website, they don’t see it the way humans do!
…So that way search engines know about everything!
Bots travel through websites by following links on one page and jumping back and forth through different pages and websites. You may ask why you should care about a bot (or sometimes called a spider) and the way it sees your website?
The answer is that you should be aware that bots build a search engine’s index and they introduce your website to the index. So your website will appear on the search results of a search engine the way you shown it to the specific bot!
To make your website search engine friendly, you should know few tips.
1- Build websites for people, not for bots.
2- Put the most important content on the top, in the code (html, xhtml, php, asp, etc.).
3- Make a navigation menu and a navigable one!
4- Use formatting styles as headings and bold or italic text where appropriate.
5- Optimize images and use “alt” text for ALL images.
6- Use CSS positionning techniques to place your content on your page.
7- Browse your website with different browsers and on different platforms.
8- Bots are basically TEXT BROWSERS! use a text browser to see how your website look in it. Use Lynx!
You can find Lynx for Windows on my downloads page.
Lynx is easy to use, and there’s a good documentation already built in. But to get you started, once installed, start Lynx, and at the prompt, enter “g” (without the quotation marks) and it will ask you for the URL you want to go to… and you’re good to go!
9- Create strong and complete header meta descriptions and keywords.
10- Choose your page titles carefully and responsibly.
11- Introduce your website to different listing directories.
By providing good and useful information to a bot when it comes to your visit, you will help the search engines to bring you the right visitors and the most important thing is that a visitor will come to you, because he wants to, and not by chance or mistake.
Worst thing which can happen to a visitor is to click on a search result, start to read a site’s text and advertisements all around and at the end say “This is the wrong place! I lost my time!”
Build great content and present it right!