Dave, I just read an article of yours where you say not to hide keyword-content with matching font and background color. I’m curious to know if the same is true for a hidden layer containing keyword-content? There is so much to learn about SEO and what are the best techniques to use!
Dave, I reviewed the sections on Building Web Site Traffic and Search Engine Optimization but I still have a question for you: Once I have set up the pages correctly, do I still
need to contact the Google Gods to let them know a site exists, or is that dynamic?
After hearing a lot about it, I went over to SitePoint and read an interesting article by a “search engine optimization expert” wherein he enumerates his list of fifteen of the most egregious techniques by which companies and individuals “spam” the search engines. What’s search engine spam, you ask? It’s using inappropriate and deceitful methods of manipulating the HTML or other elements of a site to generate a higher ranking than the site would otherwise be granted by a typical search engine relevance calculation.
Here’s a topic that should be obvious, but isn’t: how should you best code links on your site from page to page? Should you use something like “page two” or “continued…” or “more” with the page filenames as the links? Should you use absolute links that always begin with a leading / (as in “/reviews.html”), should you always use relative links (as in “../reviews.html”) or should you use fully qualified links (as in “http://www.free-web-money.com/reviews.html”)?
Here’s a search engine optimization concept that most people don’t think about: make sure you have keywords and key phrases in your TITLE tag. You know what the TITLE tag is, it’s the tag that gives you the name of the page on the Window frame in your browser, and it’s remarkable how few sites pay any attention to what’s in that critical search engine optimization (SEO) field.
Search engine optimization, or “SEO” in the biz, isn’t only for people trying to turn their Web site into a revenue machine, to make money online, but can really be useful for everyone building Web sites. There are lots of different facets to writing, designing and adjusting your Web pages to maximize the chance of them being a top result for search terms, but one of the best – and easiest – is to work with keyword density.
