Search Engine Optimisation

There has been a thread recently on the UK asp/asp.net developers list, mswebdev.org.uk and this has prompted me to share some links and thoughts here. Online marketing is a great interest of mine, it's an area I find myself moving more and more into and away from development. Perhaps there is a list in it? Alex, Steve?

I wouldn't describe myself as an SEO but I do optimise clients web sites and have had a bit of success. Having said that I try to grab any bit of information I can about the subject (often contridictory!) and would love to share links and tips. Here is the advice I gave to the poster;

"Make sure your page titles have the priority keyphrases and they are
relevant to the page - lots of companies have page titles that say "so and
so company: key phrase" but the words at the start of the title have more
weight than those at the end plus the whole thing is diluted unless you are
optimising for the name of your company. Be careful about too many
repetitions but make sure the full phrase with all the words together is
present as someone would enter it into a search. With one of our clients
just the addition or subtraction of a single word that was already present
in the title put him on page 1 result 4 or page 2 result way down.

Encourage lots of quality relevant links into the site - use the google
toolbar to discover your page rank and the page rank of the sites you want
to link to you. Dont bother if they have a low (sub 4) page rank it will not
help. The higher the page rank the more weight it gives your site. Obviously
if you are an asp.net site then http://asp.net/ and http://aspalliance.com
are the sites to be linked from, current affairs would be
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ - you get the picture. Encourage them to use your key
phrase in the link text rather than "click here". Make sure you are in dmoz
and other important directories.

Have at least 200 words, preferably 400 words of good, relevant,
keyword-laden content per page, and use <h1>, links and alt tags with your
keyphrases in. Dont use frames or flash but if you do have good noframes
text. Text link navigation is good.

Put javascript in external files so the content is as near top of stream as
possible. Pages that use query strings lag behind those that have explicit
urls so use http url rewriting - eg. http://chrisg.com/pages/recommends.aspx
is really http://chrisg.com/?page=recommends

Keywords and description meta tags still matter for some search engines but
google uses first so many words on page usually.

Even though google has 50% of market, still make sure you are ranking well
in yahoo and msn. Usually having a google success through legitimate ethical
techniques means your site will be ok in t'others too though."

Here are some links I have found useful

Final tip - if you need to find out if your site is listed in google, and which links are listed in google by page rank, use the following search format

allinurl:www.chrisg.com site:www.chrisg.com

For example; http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:www.chrisg.com%20site:www.chrisg.com

 

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