SEO101 (Webmaster Tools, Sitemaps and Meta tags)
Search Engine Optimization is a hot topic for somebody who's just launched a web based business and wants to get "on top" of Google's search results. There are a couple of steps which you should take during the coding of your website and a couple simple steps you can do after your website is "done" (a website is never "done" without quotation marks).
A common conception is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO hereafter) is a battle fought by webdesigners against the major search engines. In some views that's true, but Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's Bing are not afraid to give us ammunition. All three of these have a "webmaster tools" suite that help you submit websites, sitemaps and advise on crawl settings (you can't make any real decision regarding crawl rate). As a webmaster it's important to monitor these tools, because they'll also tell you if spiders have a problem crawling certain pages in your website.
The following all need a respective account, but a proper web guy already has Google, Yahoo, and Hotmail accounts, right?
Each of these will want you to verify as the owner of the website you are submitting, so be prepared to upload a file from each into your root directory.
Once you have these sites set up, you can check back and get insights about how your site is being crawled and indexed. You can submit a sitemap for your site too. A sitemap is an XML file that works like a table of contents for the crawl spiders. There are many tools online that generate sitemaps, but it's not difficult to write up your own if you have a small site, or do up a PHP script to generate it on the fly.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc>http://ralphvandenberg.com/</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://ralphvandenberg.com/ramblings</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
As you can see from the example above, it's really simple. You can add various attributes such as importance of pages in relation to each other, or simple only list the LOCations. As mentioned before, the CHANGEFREQuency is only a guide and will not guarantee any frequent spider visits.
At the Google Webmaster Tools they also have a PDF you can download which they say is "good practice" for getting higher on the rankings. They apologize early on for not giving away the secret to getting on top. Most of the things they mention are straight forward, like include text links, use H tags sensibly, write your content for humans not bots, etc. Some things I'd like to point out here are in relation to the META tags in your documents, mainly the TITLE and DESCRIPTION.
Google suggests that you do NOT use the same title and / or description across multiple pages. Use a descriptive title and good summary for description that matches your page contents. In the PDF documents they don't go to deep into it, but they give plenty of examples. If your page is about SEO (on webguru guide), a suitable title would be "A beginners guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Web Guru Guide", and in the description you should put a small paragraph that summarizes or introduces/intrigues your article. Don't overload keywords or write generic things like "a website about...".
I hope this will help you get started. I highly recommend reading the documentation that each search engine provides. They aren't the enemy and are generally trying to get good content on top of the results- let that be yours! If you have your own tips or questions, please write them in the comments below.
- Ralph van den Berg
visit RalphvandenBerg.com
P.S. note: the description meta tag is as follows inside your <head> tags.
<meta name="description" content="Start out Search Engine Optimization by using Google, Yahoo and Bing's webmaster tools and suggestions for good practices." />
This description and your page's title is what users [generally] see on the search results page.