SEO Tutorial: SEO Tips

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• Finding who is linking to you

Many search engines decide your ranking based on how many websites are linking to you (as well as how important those sites are). Eg - the more 'important' websites linking to you, the higher your ranking. Google is particularly famous for their PageRank system. To find out which websites are currently linking to you, visit www.google.com and in the search form, type

link:www.yourdomain.com

The search results will be all the websites with a link to www.yourdomain.com.

• Why create a site map?

To ensure all internal pages in your website are listed by search engines (which crawl the web, following links and indexing pages as they go), add a link to a site map from your home page. The site map page should contain links to all sections of your web site.

• Text hyperlinks versus javascript links

Use simple text links rather than Javascript links when linking to pages within your own site. For example:

<a href='webpage.htm'>Sub-page about stuff</a>

Most web designers do this without even thinking about it and wonder why I even bother mentioning this. But there are cases and situations where you'll be tempted to embellish or snazz up your hyperlinks. Eg - using javascript to add some bells and whistles to your links. This renders the link un-indexable by search engine crawlers. Most search engines crawling through your site will ignore the javascript links and only follow links from text links. Hence only those pages will be indexed by the search engine. There's also the factor that search engines attribute more weight to links with certain keyword phrases. How that works exactly is shrouded in search engine secrecy but the main point is the content of your hyperlink text is a factor when search engine optimising your website.

• Checking if you're listed in Google

To find out if a particular web page is listed in Google, use the 'allinurl' command in their search form. For example:

allinurl:websitedomain.com/webpage.htm

• Don't repeat words in your meta-tags

While it used to be common practice to load your meta-tags (and visible copy) with the same crucial keywords repeatedly, websites are now being penalised or removed from search engines for this practice. Don't repeat a word in your meta-tags more than three times.

• Use keywords in your hyperlinks

Search engines often attribute more weight to hyperlinks in your webpages so it's advantageous to use keywords in your hyperlinks whenever possible.

• Finding your webpage's Google Page Rank

One way Google determine's a web page's ranking is by it's PageRank, a number between 0 to 10 based on how many websites are linking to you (and how important they are).

• Checking for clean backlinks

If you're looking for backlinks to your website to boost your search engine rankings, make sure any site you consider uses "clean" links. Rather than link directly to your site, some sites use javascript or CGI redirects to link to your site in a roundabout way (usually to record stats on visitor browsing patterns). This makes the link useless as far as search engines are concerned. To check if their links are "clean", mouseover their links and look at the URL in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. If all their outward links have URLs like redirect.cgi?id=1, then it's not a clean link. But what if the mouseover gives you a description rather than a URL? In this case, when you mouseover the link, click on the link without releasing the mouse button. It will show you the URL. But wait! Some sneaky webmasters use Javascript to make the URL look like clean link. The surest way to check for clean links is to right click the link, then select Properties. This will give you the actual URL linked to.

• Web Site Ranking according to Alexa Toolbar

Alexa calulates web site ranking according to how much traffic they receive. The lower the rank, the better. For example, Yahoo has an Alexa Rank of 1 which means according to Alexa, it's the #1 website for traffic.Microsoft are #2, Google come 3rd. Alexa receives data from the Alexa Toolbar which monitors the surfing habits of anyone with the toolbar installed on their computer. It calculates a website's ranking based on traffic measured over a 3 month period. The results come from only a small percentage and demographic of the Internet population. Add to this that rankings can be fairly easily skewed (eg - get all your friends/visitors to install the toolbar and visit your site... hmm, maybe I should try that). Consequently, the results should be taken with a grain of salt.

• Finding webpages to link to your site

Finding webpages to link to your site is a laborious, time consuming task but Google can be useful for pinpointing related link pages in a single query.

"add (url OR site OR link)" OR "submit (url OR site OR link)" "keywords"

The quotes ensure you get the exact phrase 'add url' or 'add site' or 'add link' rather than the words 'add' in one section of the webpage and 'url' in a completely different section. I replace 'keywords' with whatever words are relevant to my website (you can have more than one). To make it easier, just replace 'keywords' in the form below to get taken straight to Google:

"add (url OR site OR link)" OR "submit (url OR site OR link)" "keywords"

• Checking backlinks in Yahoo

I use this query to find backlinks (eg - sites linking to me) in Yahoo by using the following search:

linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com -site:www.yourdomain.com