Optimising means everything
Optimising your site is so important especially if your ultimate goal is to rank high on any search engine. Remember if a search engine is to rank you high they are then associating them self and their reputation with you. The best way to explain is to put yourself into the shoes of the company who is running the search engine, So say you have over 5 million listings in your directory for the keyword Motorbike, who would you rank where and why?. First off, the last thing you are going to do is associate yourself with a poor website that is a mess, what you are going to do is associate and rank high the best with regards to optimisation.
What is Optimisation?
Optimisation covers a whole host of different things through the construction of your site and we will cover a number of different techniques that will help toward page rank, but before we do let me tell you why a good optimised site can do surprisingly well. Most and yes I mean most people who develop a site think once the site is online their work is done; these individuals have created a site with nothing but dollar signs in their eyes, they neither had a passion for the subject to which there site is based upon and done no research. So by reading this I would say you are off to a pretty good start and already have an edge. Make sure what you are about to embark upon is a passion or something you have a solid knowledge about, if you do it will leap of your pages and grab the visitors attention.
Keywords
This used to be the first stop of the search engine when sifting through a web site trying to establish the content within the site; however the system had flaws, for one Meta Keywords are in your HTML code tucked away in the background.
{Example}Meta name=”description” content=”a brief description of your website”
meta name="keywords" content="Motorbikes
MotoGP, Yamaha, Suzuki, Budgeting, ECT, ECT, ECT" />
So if my web site was about Motorbikes these are the kind of keywords I would use, you could use as many as you wish basically anything that best describes the content of your site. However because these Meta Keywords are in the HTML code tucked away in the background people abused the system. By this I mean take Music that’s a big and popular thing on the web so each day millions of people would be searching the web for a certain artist, or the latest hot album; making these Hot Keywords. Now people would have Madonna Michael Jackson Kings of Leon Cold play, and so on in their Keywords even although their site was nothing to do with this, they added these words to generate hits. Yes people would probably only stay for ten seconds once they realized the site was nothing to do with what they were looking for, but a hit is a hit regardless if the visitor stays ten seconds or ten minutes; time was not monitored hits were. The reason behind this was the more traffic to your site the higher you ranking on a search engines page.
Optimising Images
The search engine adopted a new tactic. Instead of heading directly to your Meta details they first search through your Images folder within your site. Most If not all web sites have images, and people like their content uniformed neat and tidy. So If your web site was about motorbikes and you had a nice picture of a Yamaha motorbike you are most likely to give it the name Yamaha x2r, or whatever make and model it is, this way you can easily identify the picture through its tag. Now you are not going to call a picture of a Yamaha (Madonna), as this would just confuse yourself and all your content would be a mess.
The Meta method is still used but only after cross reference with your Images folder, and if the two do not match up the search engine dumps your site and refuses access on to their search results. Things to remember: always give your pictures relative tags; try not to use Yamaha1 and Yamaha2. Try Yamaha_x2r_Red-2009, as you can see I have listed the make, model, colour and year. Also remember to crop your Images and make them smaller if possible, remember if this site is motorbike related that is what the visitors are here to see; so ditch the unnecessary backdrop. If you have access to a photo editing suit try lowering the quality as it may be the case a 60% image looks just as good as one with 100% quality resulting in a much quicker loading time. For more Information on this topic watch the following tutorial by clicking here
How often is the site updated?
Make sure your website is regularly updated, every two or three days would be sufficient. Again common sense comes into play no one is going to associate with a dormant website that has no new fresh content for the visitor to return for Information. So always add new content to your website, try and keep the design the same. If you do change any design element make the change subtle as a complete overall will cause the visitor to think they are at the wrong site.
Inbound Links
Although all the steps in optimising our site have been very important I would say the inbound link is probably the most Important. Now I can only surmise how the system works but as an example, imagine an outgoing link to be -1point and an incoming link worth +1 point, and an incoming link from a website in the coveted top 20 could earn you as much as 20 to 50 points. Now we all need outgoing links so I am by no means saying that is a bad thing. The point I am trying to get across is the Importance of an Incoming link, this tells the search engine that an already well established website is prepared to associate itself with you. Also if this link is page specific by this I mean the site is not linking to your index page but a page within, then this is all the better as the message this sends to the search is you have content to offer that the already established site does not. How can this be? Well say your site has listings of all the related events in Europe the other site may be from the U.S and only offers listings of events in the United States, so to offer their audience with more information they link to your events page.
Number of pages
We have all come across them, sites that have only one page which directs you to a whole load of other sites, this is usually the tactic adopted by those who own parked domains waiting on a sale. Make sure your site has at least ten to fifteen pages more is even better, but more with good content. This tells the search your site has depth and content on the topic in which your website is based upon. Also use heading tags through your pages and when given the opportunity make use of any alternative tags.
Tutorials dedicated to having your site fully optimised for the web.
Dreamweaver tutorial {Adding meta Key Words}
Dreamweaver tutorial {Optimizing our site}
Dreamweaver tutorial {HTML Validation}
Dreamweaver tutorial {HTMLTidy}
Favicon HTML
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/filename.ico"/>
This must be placed between <head>here</head> tags.
For more information watch the video under the following links.
Animated Favicon
When creating an animated favicon the .ico image must be saved on the site root, to accomplish this just drag the image over the main site root folder and let go.
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favicon.ico" >
<link rel="icon" href="images/animated_favicon.gif" type="image/gif">
