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Score BIG With The Search Engines - Maximising Your Site's Potential
engines pay a lot of attention to the content in a page's title and this should describe exactly what the page is about. As mentioned above, try and include your keywords in the page title and then give the page a heading title that matches or is very similar to the page title and include it in a <H1></H1>. If you don't like the appearance of the text within a H1 you can format the text style within your css document.

External Links

All the major search engines place a high premium on this and therefore so should you! Actively seek good links from websites in the same interest area as your site. The more important the site the better as search engines will place a higher value for a link from an "authority" site than from for a link from a less popular site. Make sure that in your link text you include your keywords rather than just the name of your site. For example, if your site is about sauce pans, put "Buy Sauce Pans" instead of "www.saucepanheaven.com".

Create search engine friendly url's

This can have a huge effect on the number of pages of your site that will be indexed. A lot of search engines steer away from indexing pages that have a lot of parameters. We've all seen them. www.somesite.com/article.php?id=32&category=2 and such things. Some search engines will stop when they see a ? and therefore it won't be able to see all the content in the site.

One way around this problem is through a method called mod_rewrite. I am not going to cover mod_rewrite in this article as it is too large a topic to cover within the scope of this article but a lot of articles can be found that teach you how do this. To summarise, it is a server side tool that converts the above url to something like www.somesite.com/article/32/2. This page can now be indexed along with every other article in the site. I would highly recommend looking into this as in my experience it has given me the best return.

Conclusion

If you follow these steps you'll quickly start to see your website popularity grow. Sometimes you have to go through trial and error, especially when choosing keywords but the effort you put in will be returned as the search engines start to pick up on your improvements and start directing more traffic to you. We'll be covering a lot of these topics in much greater detail in the coming articles so be sure to check back for more valuable advice.

Steve Ashton is programmer and web developer. He runs 2 popular websites http://www.webdevshed.com and http://www.programmertutorials.com.

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