When you are on the web, you want your website to be seen, even better is your website to be seen most by its intended audience. SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization which will be a useful partner in helping you reach that audience. Making your website people friendly is also really important, so keep useability in mind, a frustrated and confused web visitor is not a good thing, a website that is both user friendly and search engine friendly is what you want.
A URL can be the web address of any page on a website, for instance the URL of this page is http//:servertosite.com/seo-search-engine-optimization.html
It is important to have a URL that has key words related to what the page is about, I like to even make the URL descriptive of the page. I recommend hyphenating between the words. Do not make the words touch each other in a long line. My URL's end with .html this is pretty much the industry standard ending for search engine friendly URL's but on some dynamic pages it may be unavoidable to have something that is not so neat, really though SEO the URL's should resemble something similar to what I have on the URL's all over this website servertosite.com
Make sure that your website has SEO URL's as website software that has not got them does not have an excuse not to in this day and age, (SEO URL's are commonly set in the Apache .htaccess file, lots of software already has the required .htaccess code already in a .htaccess file for you).
Now that hopefully you are writing better URL's on your website. Lets get into The title and Meta tags in relation to SEO in the HTML source of your web pages.
First the title, which isn't actually a meta tag but an XHTML tag that sits just before the meta tags. This is where you put the title of your page, make sure the title is relevant and contains key words relevant to what the body text is about. When you see Google search results of your website, individual pages on your site will show what is written between the XHTML title tags as the heading for each particular page in the search results. Keeping that in mind, make sure each page has different things written relevant to each page to avoid confusing non relevant duplication for search engines. The same goes with the meta tags we will be discussing shortly...
What an XHTML title tag looks like in the source code of XHTML expressed to the public in a web browser or any other time you have access to your websites XHTML. Example below for a page about PHP email contact forms:
<title>Download PHP email contact form software</title>
Now the important Meta Tags to take note of are:
The description tag. You can write a description of the page here, just do not write the same things you wrote in the heading tag. Example below:
<meta name="description" content="Spam hacker safe PHP contact forms with a variety of different interface options" />
The keywords Meta tag, is where you can put key words that relate to your webpage, example below:
<meta name="keywords" content="form, php, email, software, download" />
That concludes the important meta tags, even then the title is the most important, they are the only two SEO related meta tags I ever use, but since lots of people jam pack non relevant keywords in these Meta tags, search engines do not rely on them to heavily, just make sure you have a good XHTML title and make sure it is relevant.
The main headings at the top each page you make should be put between XHTML h1 tags as shown further below, this is the web standard and search engines understand XHTML tags. It is just simply incorrect to put headings outside of heading tags and paragraphs of paragraph tags on the web. Remember to use them or your website will become a lazy mess.
<h1>Hello I am the Main Heading of The Page, I am The Most Important Heading</h1>
Headings in the body text of your article or what ever writing can be given a h2 tag or heading two tag around them. Even lesser headings can have a h3 tag put around them. You can even go down to h4 and lower, but I can't see any reason to go below h4 myself.
<h2>I am a Heading Inside of Some Content, Between Some Paragraphs Etc</h2>
Oh yeah and a paragraph tag looks like <p>Hello, paragraph goes in here</p>
Notice how XHTML tags start with an opening <iamatag> and end with a forward slash in the closing bracket like so</iamatag> the exception is a few tags like meta tags which have the forwards slash at the end of the last bracket just like break tag which looks like <br /> and has the forward slash at the end, it also has only one pair of brackets unlike heading and paragraph tags.
Now that I have mentioned the heading tags and paragraph tags that you will be using all the time on your website (If you are not you should be). Lets not forget what you write on your website and how much you write. If you have a website full of useful information that people actually want to read about, that helps them in some way, then this is how to create a really search engine friendly website, the more you keep on adding great content to your website the better, because in the end, what you want is visitors, the more suited the visitor is to your topics or products the better. if you offer people rubbish or a website that is somewhat of a half hearted effort, your website will be nothing more than that, rubbish... So put your heart into your website and the content that goes into it. I don't mean waste your life on it, just do it properly, for the good of your business or for the good of whatever else your website happens to be about.
This is very important, getting links to your website.
If a website that has information that is relevant to your website and lists high in Google or some other popular search engines search results links to your website, this is very good for your website and should make you rank higher, the more times this happens from different websites the better.
If a high ranking website has lots and lots of links to many different websites, either because you can put the links there yourself like in a forum signature or it is web directory of some kind, but I should imagine links in blog comments are one of the least worthwhile. If you get links from any of the place I just mentioned then the impact this will have on your website will be nothing amazing, the less other links the site linking to you has and the higher the quality of content and repute the other websites that website links to you, the better for you. You do not want to have links to your website in the company of a bunch of spam links to spammy websites, this is not going to help you. But don't despair read on...
You can check the html source of a website (This can be done going to 'view' in the menu on Firefox and clicking on page source and going to 'page' on Internet Explorer version 8 and clicking on view source). When you have done this you can click control 'f' on your keyboard and search for whatever text was written on your link, to find your link in the source code. If you see rel="nofollow" in the html/xhtml around your link, then this means no page rank will passed on from that website to your website. Does this mean that the link is not worthwhile. No, it is still good, so long as on a page that people will regularly read or check other information. If the search engines don't care, not to worry, if you get people directly going through the link to you, then that is still good right. no follow links are more useless when they are on pages that will get buried in search results and not seen by many people because the page is not very popular or some other reason.
Even though nearly all links from social networking sites will likely be nofollow links, they can still be good if say you have good content and it gets noticed on for example a social networking site like digg.com, this can be a way of getting people direct traffic without the help of search engines, by using social networking sites as a way of getting pages on your site noticed. Keep in mind this is not as easy as it may sound, getting the right combination of keywords catchy title and article, information or product that people will tell others about is something that some people seem to be in my opinion, more gifted at then others.
I heard on Ozzy radio station ABC 702 when they had their web specialist Tom Reynolds talk about websites, he mention that it is good idea for businesses who sell products, that they ask their suppliers if they will link to them, being a distributer and all, since they are an approved seller of their products, so they can put your website on a retail distributers list, regional distributers list or something similar on their website. I think this is a great idea, because not only is this good for you search engine wise, it shows that you sell a genuine article and also shows that you are not some grey market seller but the real deal... Seriously businesses contact your distributers and get shown on their website as someone who sells their products and don't just have your contact number and address, see if you can get a link to your website from their website.
What is it? The worlds most popular search engine, Google.com, refers to duplicate as substantive duplicate blocks of content within either a single website or spread across different domain names, that either have exactly the same content or very similar content.
What is acceptable and unacceptable when it comes to duplicate content: I personally have no problem having duplicate content on my site, where it will help with usability for the user or else I think it silly to waste my time going to extremes just to impress search engines, for instance, you can find duplicate content written for the BSD license for my different PHP projects on this website. I also have duplicate content with the Ads in the right column of the vast majority of pages on this website. But for Google at least, I have tried to make it known to them that they are Ads and not some kind of content to try and lift rankings, by putting <!-- google_ad_section_start --> and <!-- google_ad_section_end --> around everything in the right column HTML, which are legit Google HTML comment tags.
Now according to Google (click here the for page I am talking about), Google is more concerned about people who are trying to use duplicate content in the hope of using deceptive techniques to raise the search ranking of their websites, usually with large amounts of duplicate or otherwise similar content. People that copy other people websites and then stick Ads all over the duplicate site, is an example of this.
So from what I can gather, use duplicate content in moderation and use only where you think it would be silly to try and rewrite something on a whole bunch of pages, just to impress the search engines. In other words I would recommend not to go wasting your time trying to avoid having any duplicate content at all costs, but take care not to make your website a duplicate content mess either. Also as Google mentioned in the link I posted in the last paragraph, had you been interested in reading the page, don't go linking from pages in your website to both a home folder index page like for instance ../ and also linking to index.html on other pages, thus creating duplicate content by force, which Google would have otherwise have had the good sense to ignore... Also keep in mind, if you have something like text files that you include into PHP pages, keep the text files in a folder and put in your robots.txt file a 'disallow' to the text file folder like in the examples below (Do not use robots.txt to block proper page content on your website though, as Google does not recommend it in the Google page I referred to before). You may want to also consider robots.txt if you are having a duplicate mobile version of your website, if you can target the folder or folders from where the HTML is displayed in web browsers and crawled by robots from... I will write about robot.txt files a little lower down when I have time.
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /folderwithtextfiles
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folderwithtextfiles
Google has made it possible to direct Google to what page you want to be your main page if you have duplicates and have no confusion or erroneous indexing with the rest of the identical or close to identical duplicates. This is by going into the header of the HTML in all your duplicate pages that are the same duplicates and putting the HTML as follows, but with your main duplicated page as the href below. you can even copy and paste the below and put it straight in your duplicate headers, thats all pages that are duplicated the same, even the original. You will have no need to block these pages with robots.txt then, Google would much rather you did it like this. That said, text files with duplicate content for PHP includes or something similar, I think robots.txt is the way to go as you are not going to put HTML header tags in text files.
Ok, back on track, you can copy and paste the below just under your meta tags (You know, like the meta tags mentioned further up before in this article). Please remember to change the href to your main page of the duplicates, the page you actually want the Google placing its search engine wait on in regards to the content in question.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://itsadomainname.com/mainpageofduplicates.html"/>
Do you think this would be the way to go if you had a duplicate mobile website of your main website or do you think robots.txt would be the way to go in this instance? You can contact me and let me know if you are an SEO savvy mobile developer.
Thankyou for looking, this page is a work in progress, the content will grow bigger when I give spare time to add to this article...
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