Hi everyone,

Recently I've gone live with a new client's site. I've coded the site using Web Standards, and chosen solid meta keywords/descriptions.

I managed to get the site showcased on www.cssmania.com, which helped a lot.

I was just curious, what else are some free, effective ways of improving search engine rank? Obviously I could search Google for this, but I'm actually more curious about what do my fellow DreamHosters do for their clients as far as SEO goes?

By the way, here's the address to the site if you're interested...

<a href="http://advantagesportswear.com/">http://advantagesportswear.com/</a>

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I was just curious, what else are some free, effective ways of improving search engine rank? Obviously I could search Google for this,

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For starters, bookmark this link: Google Info for Webmasters

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but I'm actually more curious about what do my fellow DreamHosters do for their clients as far as SEO goes?

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There are a few simple things I make sure of:
1..Compliance to W3C Standards; see CSS validation on the same site. Spider bots do not like sloppy/crappy (X)HTML. And avoid using frames at all costs.
2..Keywords for each page should be relevant to the content of that page. Note: the homepage link you posted would be out-of-spec in that regard
3..No cutesy tricks like keyword bombing, invisible text, etc. because most spiders are wary of that nonsense now, and may in fact reject the site altogether (..at least I know the googlebot does that).
4..Linkbacks from *reputable* websites; again, spiders are becoming more wary of link farms and other shady tricks and won't be long before they get filtered out altogether.
5..Patience. Took almost 6 months to get up to third page of Google for products from most of my client sites.
6..As always: Spamming=BAD.

Howzat for starters?

As with most things, the way to rise to the top is to be the best. Build one of the best sites for a given topic, and it will rank well. And by "best" I don't mean "pretty" or "professionally designed", I mean how well users think it meets their needs.

Beyond writing good <title> tags for each page and favoring real text over images of words, my SEO pretty much consists of trying to build great sites. And my sites rank highly all over the engines for a multitude of money terms.

I got that by focusing on quality, and NOT by using invisible text, keyword stuffing, keyword density, stupid reciprocal link exchanges, search engine "submission", META tags, or any of the other popular things that many people think they need to worry about.

Here's my article on the subject: http://WebsiteHelpers.com/seo

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And by "best" I don't mean "pretty" or "professionally designed", I mean how well users think it meets their needs.

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Very good advice.

I think too many people concentrate on what they think the search engines want and forget about what their users want.

In my experience, if you concentrate on keep your users happy, the search engines will follow :)

Mark

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look, you should NOT pay attention to search engines, they WILL find you, even if your site has no content at all!

if you look at http://www.google.be/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:nl:official_s&hl=nl&q=schietschijf&meta=&btnG=Google+zoeken you will see that my site is ranked at the top of the page (that is first, second, third, fourth,...) and hasn't even have content except the soon message.

So pay attention to your content instead of to search engines, because if you have a good article, you get linked and searched in search engines and there you are!


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slauson.dreamhost.com rocks! (so does my site :))
link me

While I agree with the sentiment that content is king, "schietschijf" isn't exactly the most common word. In fact I can't even find a translation in quick searches. That's a unique one you got there.

schietschijf is dutch for bullseye in the meaning of a target, the thing you aim at


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slauson.dreamhost.com rocks! (so does my site :))
link me

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schietschijf is dutch for bullseye in the meaning of a target, the thing you aim at

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Do the Dutch *really* hunt bulls...and do they really aim at the bull's *eye*?

--rlparker

ok ok ok ;) for this time my english wasn't that correct but i don't care, you understood me, that's the most important on a discussion board.

And actually I'm a belgian who speaks dutch and i live in Flanders (not Ned Flanders)
some info


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slauson.dreamhost.com rocks! (so does my site :))
link me

Oops! Your English is *very good*, and your posts have been very helpful to many on these forums.

I was just making a joke, and was not meaning to make fun of you at all. I'm sorry if it seemed I was making fun of your English. Please forgive me, and I'll be more careful with my jokes next time, ok?

--rlparker

What is your thought about pretty urls? I developed a PHP shopping cart that does pass some variables via GET. It seems in today's modern world that the search engines would index those pages, but my experience is that pages passing variables (even descriptive ones) consistently have lower page ranks than plain html.

I would also think the page extension (like PHP vs HTML) would not matter today, but I'm not convinced. Google does post their info about what constitutes a "friendly" page, but it is by far complete.

================================
Angela Gann
CrimsonDryad Web Design Services
Web Design, Custom Software Development
http://www.crimsondryad.com

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What is your thought about pretty urls?

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I prefer them. Nicer to look at & easier to remember.

It also makes links more self-explanatory in an all-text environment. I'm sure many of us recognize this one:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/DNS_-_Viewing_site_before_DNS_change

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I developed a PHP shopping cart that does pass some variables via GET. It seems in today's modern world that the search engines would index those pages,

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They do. You'll see plenty of dynamic URLs in the search results.

Not a bad idea to (at least try to) keep session IDs out of the URL, or atleast not use names like "id=" -- I believe at least that one, and maybe a few others are dropped by Google (not sure about others), since they often refer to sessions.

You can also give the search engines a shove in the right direction with a site map.

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but my experience is that pages passing variables (even descriptive ones) consistently have lower page ranks than plain html.

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But are you comparing two otherwise close-to-identical sites, with similar on & offsite SEO?
Example: /cart.php?cat=dishes&subcat=plates&productnumber=102398 with 5,000 incoming links will do better in Google than /cart/dishes/plates/9832094324.html will with only 5. ;)

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I would also think the page extension (like PHP vs HTML) would not matter today, but I'm not convinced. Google does post their info about what constitutes a "friendly" page, but it is by far complete.

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File extension, like TLD, doesn't matter.

I just googled asus motherboard to sample some search results. The first page contains multiple TLDs, static HTML links, different file extensions, dynamic links and even a link pulling from the PATH_INFO variable (Ex: cart.php/var/value/var2/value2)... so you should be fine with any of those.

Same info and much much more straight from the google-horse's mouth.



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Backlinks, meta tags, domain.tld/index.php domain.tld/about.php (name your pages correctly), title tags, major submissions to search engines, keep the revisit to how often you update the page (static pages can be crawled on a weekly basis, if you update the page every couple of days, put it to like 2), make sure images have alt tags, use <p> tags, use h1 tags...

You get the picture.

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Backlinks, meta tags, domain.tld/index.php domain.tld/about.php (name your pages correctly), title tags, major submissions to search engines, keep the revisit to how often you update the page (static pages can be crawled on a weekly basis, if you update the page every couple of days, put it to like 2), make sure images have alt tags, use <p> tags, use h1 tags...

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No.

Meta tags are useless, the search engines have ignored them for nearly 10 years now.

Submitting your site is useless. The engines will find it on their own.

Specifying revisit time is useless. The engines prefer to figure out for themselves when to revisit and to recrawl.

Putting alt parameters in images is probably the least important thing, unless you're trying to rank well on image searches. My sites rank highly with zero alt parameters.

What works is *building a great site with compelling content*. Period. The cream rises to the top. Which of the following do you think Google would prefer to say?

"We picked these sites to show you because they're adept at putting in META tags and they specified revisit time in their robots.txt file and they did a whole bunch of other tricks."

- or -

"We picked these sites to show you because WE THOUGHT THEY BEST MATCHED WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR."

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Meta tags are useless, the search engines have ignored them for nearly 10 years now.

Submitting your site is useless. The engines will find it on their own.

Specifying revisit time is useless. The engines prefer to figure out for themselves when to revisit and to recrawl.

Putting alt parameters in images is probably the least important thing, unless you're trying to rank well on image searches. My sites rank highly with zero alt parameters.

What works is *building a great site with compelling content*. Period. The cream rises to the top. Which of the following do you think Google would prefer to say?

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I don't claim to be an expert, but I can "G00gle" and read.

> Meta tags are useless, the search engines have ignored them for nearly 10 years now.

This is a credible, recent article, with reference links, that says MSN and Yahoo currently use some meta tags.

> Submitting your site is useless. The engines will find it on their own.

I agree the engines will probably find it eventually, as G00gle confirms, but they also say even they miss some sites and seem to encourage submitting site maps. Their invitation to submit your site probably wouldn't be there if it wasn't somewhat useful.

> Specifying revisit time is useless. The engines prefer to figure out for themselves when to revisit

If one, as site owner, thinks an engine visits too often, communicating a preferred time to the engine is useful.

> Putting alt parameters in images is probably the least important thing, unless you're trying to rank well on image searches. My sites rank highly with zero alt parameters.

It is quite important to some *people*, which is more important to me. I also enjoy the descriptive text "popup", but it seems like title is now required for that?

> What works is *building a great site with compelling content*. Period. The cream rises to the top.

Good content that's well viewed with Lynx. ;-)

--

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DreamHost Customers wiki And Forum

Just to add to what Anonymous2 already said:

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Meta tags are useless, the search engines have ignored them for nearly 10 years now.

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Google doesn't represent all search engines. But even if only 1 or 2 used them, wouldn't it be worth taking the extra 5 seconds to add them?

And if scraper sites/directories are going to grab my info to trigger Adsense ads, I'd rather they use MY description of the site, rather than just pulling a random sentence or two from the page.

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Submitting your site is useless. The engines will find it on their own.

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They find them through links... which submitting to a few directories that are already indexed accomplishes.

Unless Google drops the whole PR thing, there's no reason to not submit to directories that pass it along.

All of them seem to value incoming links--and I don't think any of them are as good at picking out which ones are trash as they'd like us all to believe... so I definitely wouldn't consider it a waste.

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What works is *building a great site with compelling content*. Period.

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That helps with getting natural inbound links & return visitors... but SEO doesn't end there.

There are plenty of subjects that have a bunch of good sites out there, but you can't have 20 people tie for first place.

The ones that climb are often the ones that do every little thing they can--even though other people told them, "that won't help." Not because a panel of experts analyzed their sited then manually placed them in order of relevance.

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The cream rises to the top.

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Paid ads rise to the top. And to the side. ;)

The 'cream' and the garbage get to share the remaining real estate left on the page. I just did a test search on Google that brought up 11 paid ads and 10 organic results on the first page. So no amount of content--or SEO--can match the mighty power of an Adwords account. ;)

Surely, you've done a search where the top results were spam/trash, right? How do you think they got there?

Even just recently, someone managed to get over one billion spam subdomains indexed in Google.

The Googlebot isn't as smart as many people seem to think.

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Which of the following do you think Google would prefer to say?

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It doesn't matter what they'd prefer to say. Unless they find a team of unbiased humans to hand review billions of websites, there will always be an advantage for those that figure out bits & pieces of their algorithm and now how to use it.


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Google doesn't represent all search engines. But even if only 1 or 2 used them, wouldn't it be worth taking the extra 5 seconds to add them?

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Okay, name EVEN 1 OR 2 major search engines that actually use the META Keyword tag in their ranking algorithm. There aren't any. Not Google, not Yahoo, not MSN, not anybody.

If people really want to put in META Keywords tags, y'all have fun wasting your time. I'll continue to focus on content (and continue to outrank you).

Okay, I checked, and stand corrected: Yahoo *does* use Meta Keywords in its ranking algorithm, but probably only to a very small degree. Definitely not enough for me to add them to my pages (which are already ranking well without them).

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... not Yahoo ...

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16 minutes later...

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Okay, I checked, and stand corrected: Yahoo *does* use Meta Keywords in its ranking algorithm

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Yeah, a small player like Yahoo is pretty easy to overlook in the search engine world.

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I'll continue to focus on content (and continue to outrank you).

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Who told you not to focus on content? The problem is that you did tell people not to focus on things that actually help.

You can come here and blab that you can outrank anyone for anything as much as you want. Even if you ever provide actual proof to back up what is otherwise a pointless claim, you should still expect to get called out when giving bad advice.


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Did you miss where I said "I stand corrected."? Geez.

I still maintain that even though Yahoo may look at Meta keywords, it almost certainly does not place that much weight on them. If it did then search would be as useless as it was in 1998.