It don't matter anything can get hits its all on how you advertise it
this might help
A bit of history ...
A few years ago it was enough to put a title and some metatags on your site to get a higher rank in the search engines. Nowadays search engines are using advanced filtering techniques, algorithms, ...
Search engines and search providers ...
A search engine is nothing without content. Search providers are delivering the content for the search engines. Some companies use the content of another company, some companies are using more than one search provider, some companies are both search engine and search provider, ...
Two types of search providers ...
You have two types of search providers: search robots and directories. Search robots are crawling automatically the whole internet. Directories are directories with links arranged in categories. They are managed manually by professionals, so they have more content value. Most search providers are using both techniques.
Search robots in three steps
Search robots are doing their job in three steps. First they use spiders (aka crawlers) to crawl the world wide web (and the links submitted by users). Then all the info gets indexed using an algorithm. These two steps are happening again after a few weeks or a day or some hours if your site is a news site and the search engine finds your site interesting. The third step is the reporting of the info to the user. Also for this step, the search engine uses a complex algorithm to calculate the pagerank and to compare the relevancy of the info.
The Basics:
* It has been proven that more than 50?f all site visitors reaches a site for the first time using a search engine, so take your time for the SEO of your site.
* There are many SEO companies promising you the best search engine results ever, ... You pay a lot of money for them, but after a few months, your results are decreasing again. Sometimes they are dubious and they use special, forbidden (search engines can ban your site) "tricks" (hidden links, doorway pages, cloaking, ...) for it. You don't need those companies, you can do it yourself.
* Don't use services to submit your site to a complete list of search engines. SEO is different for all sites, it's something personal for your site and those services can't achieve this.
* Don't focus on Google only: Ofcourse Google is the most important search engine, but don't forget Yahoo!, MSN, AskJeeves and all the others.
* What's the purpose? You have to focus on your purposes all the time! Which are the main keywords of your site? ...? The more specific your keywords are, the better.
* A search engine searches for letter combinations, not for words. You don't need to optimize your site for webdesign and design. Webdesign is enough.
* There's more than you can see: the source code of your site is important (more about this in the next chapter).
* The three important points for a higher pagerank: the location of the keywords, the frequence and combination with other keywords of them and the linking to your site with good keywords.
Techniques:
* A search engine isn't stupid. Putting hundreds of times the same word on a page or putting keywords in the same color of the background (hidden links) at the top of the page doesn't work.
* Don't use keystuffing (some search engines are banning sites using this). Keystuffing is the use of non-associated keywords to get more visitors. Maybe you get more visitors, but you mislead them and they don't come back.
* Put your main keywords together, don't spread them out on the page. This gives you a better pagerank, because the search engine is thinking that the content is more unique. When you spread them out on the page, the search engine thinks that it's a topic, which results in a lower pagerank.
* Pick the correct domain name. Everyone understands that for example digitalcameras.com is better than johnsphotocorner.com.
* Having a HTML/CSS W3C compliant page gives your site a higher rank in most of the search engines. Nuke-Evolution is more HTML/CSS W3C compliant than the standard PHP-Nuke and we are still working on this.
* Frames (and iframes) are evil. Don't use them on your site. A search engine can't read them, he only sees the "Your browser doesn't support frames." message and he leaves the site. And having that message in your site description on Google isn't very professional.
* Tables are evil, but not all. Tables are meant to display data, not for the layout of content (use CSS instead). This is a huge problem in PHP-Nuke. PHP-Nuke uses a lot of tables and a little bit of CSS, also because of this, the layout isn't flexible.
* Don't use pop-ups.
* Pick a good title for your site: put your site name AND description in the title. Put the name of the forum category and the topic name in the title of the forum, ... Don't give all your pages the same title. Nuke-Evolution is doing this already for you.
* Use the meta tags! The keywords and the description are essential, but also don't forget the author, copyright, language, pragma, publisher, robots (!), ... meta tags. Nuke-Evolution has got a meta tag manager in the configuration, so use it!
* Pick a good description with good keywords in it. I don't have to tell you that "Nuke-Evolution fansite, everything about Nuke-Evolution, we love Nuke-Evolution, Nuke-Evolution is fantastic." is a bad description.
* Putting a lang (language) attribute in the html tag of your site, gives your site a higher rank when you are searching for pages with the specified language. This is a standard function of Nuke-Evolution and you can edit the language in the Configuration (don't use the full name, but the abbreviation of the language).
* Information on the top (header) and the bottom (footer) of the site is more interesting for search engines. Putting a copyright message with your site name and description in the footer is a good idea.
* When you are using tables in the "bad way", then use the thead (for the header row(s)), tbody and tfoot (for the footer row(s)) tags. You can also use the summary attribute to give a description of the table's content for speech-synthesizing and non-visual browsers. Search engines will appreciate the extra info.
* Don't use a lot of flash objects and don't put text in a flash object. A search engine can't read it.
* Don't use texts from other sites. Having original content is having a higher quality content for the search engines.
* Text is better than images and/or Javascript for the site navigation (you can use mouseovers and other events to spice it up).
* Pay attention to the spelling. When you misspell a word, it isn't a good keyword, because most of the users aren't misspelling it when they type it in the search engine.
* Don't use images from other sites, only use images hosted on the same domain name. Remember: Search engines love original content.
* Offer alternatives: noscript tags, noframe tags, noplugin scripts, ... Some search engines are giving "bonus points" for this.
* Also offer an alternative text for images with the alt attribute (put a little description in it, not only one word). It's a lot of work, but your site earns some bonus points!
* Pay attention to the file name of images. Use as much as possible descriptive filenames. All PHP-Nuke sites have a /images/logo.gif image. Change the file name of it to your site name and change it also in the configuration of your PHP-Nuke site. Changing the file names of the logo image (and other interesting images) of your themes is also a good idea.
* Don't use parameters (for example for session id's) in your URL. Parameters with ? and & in urls (for example: yoursite.com/page.php?id=5&cat=3) are hard to read for search engines. Also read the next point about this.
* Search engines prefer static (.html) above dynamic (.php, .asp, ...) pages. You can use url rewrite tools to accomplish this. Probably this will be included in the advanced version of Nuke-Evolution.
* Use a good description for links. "Click here" is one of the worst things you can do. Put good keywords in the link description.
* Use a site map (and put a link to it on your homepage). A site map lists all the content in a basic layout with links to the original content on the site. Spiders love them and your site will have a higher pagerank (having a site map with static urls is the best thing). There is a site map and a link to it on the homepage included in Nuke-Evolution and there's a more advanced version of it in the supplementary folder. Use it!
* Having links to your site on high quality sites (sites with a high page rank). The more links there are to your site, the better. Pay attention to the keywords used to link to your site. Make sure all of your link partners are linking to the same page on your site! This is one of the most powerful ways to increase your pagerank. This has been abused a lot. Some time ago, a group of webloggers linked the biography of the American President George W. Bush on whitehouse.gov to the keywords "miserable" and "failure" with this method.
* Submit your site to web directories (pay attention to the description and the keywords). As I said before, they contain sites of high quality, so that's a good thing for your pagerank. The Open Directory Project for example is a very good friend of Google, ... Other directories are: Yahoo! Directory, The WWW Virtual Library, LookSmart, ...
* "Bad" links in the forum signatures, ... A lot of people put a link in their signature to make their site popular. Because of this, the search engines are associating your site with non-associated sites, which is a bad thing for your pagerank. You can stop search engines following those links by adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to those links.
* Follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines of the W3C. If you follow those guidelines, your website will be better accessible for users and search engines.
* Search engines can "read the font size": the more bigger, the more important the text is. But putting the whole site in a gigantic font isn't a solution, that doesn't work. Put an important sentence (with keywords) in a big font, not only keywords. Use the H1 tag, it's a very effective method!
Answered By: Will - 11/19/2006 |