Search Engine Optimisation?

[dcv]

I'm just about finishing development on my first site, a company website for a 'media' start-up. The site contains news, company info, contact details and biographies of around 20 clients.

It's not live yet as I've been testing it locally but I should be uploading it to teh intarwebz soon! Can you please give me some tips on how to ensure my site is found in Google and other search engines?

As I understand it, Google doesn't pay a lot of attention to <meta> keywords tags but other search engines do. What else can I do? At the moment I have one standard title across all pages of the website (just the company name and founder). I'm using PHP includes so the html head is the same on all pages but I guess I could split this out so that I can change the title on other pages (e.g. use the client name as the title for the biography pages) if that makes any difference to search results.



Any tips/tricks/links to useful sites would be much appreciated! Thanks

 

[tomoisyourgod]

put links within text captions...

is a desktop computer designed and built by Apple Inc.. It has been a large part of Apple's consumer desktop offerings since its introduction in 1998 and has evolved through three distinct forms.

also make sure your website is well navigated and think about the user experience for getting around your website.

Another good factor is the URL, ensure that files are saved in well named directories.

check out this for a start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

hope this helps

 

[ambient]

adding a robot.txt file and sitemap to the root directory can help especially for google.

putting your link as your sig can also go a long way too

 

[tominated]

signup for google sitemaps. It lets you put a file in it and it will load your site into the database like that

 

[Trogloxene]

Validate your site for errors here: (http://validator.w3.org/)

Don't focus on SEO, just make your site useful and good.

-T

 

[dcv]

Thanks for the replies. Will definitely look into Google sitemaps and the robots thing. I checked for W3C validation a few weeks ago and it seemed fine but as I've been making little changes here and there I'll have to remember to validate it again. As for links within text captions, well there aren't really any links other than the navigation, which I've done with CSS background rollovers.

I think I need to remove some of the meta keywords I've added as there are quite a few and I don't want to be accused of keyword spamming!

It's interesting that you mention well named URLs and directories... I've used a 3-character naming convention for all the "clients" as it's made life a lot easier than using the whole name for labelling images, div/class tags, filenames etc. So for example, the link to Fred Bloggs' biography would open a page called clientFBL.php. Would it make any difference (for search engine hits) to rename this to fredbloggs.php (or FredBloggs.php or fred-bloggs.php) or whatever?


Anyway, thanks again for your comments