Getting a better search ranking?

[Padso]

What is the easiest and cheapest to get my site up higher on some search engines?

 

[jon_r]

• Links to and from your site - ideally from decently ranked pages.
• Relevant page names
• Have plenty of text on the front page
• Have relevant text on frontpage
• Have relevant phrases on front page
• text alternative to flash
• Well written Title
• Well writen Keywords
• Well written Page description
• Alt tags on images

 

[Red Cup]

• Alt tags on images

Arrrrgghhh!! They are ATTRIBUTES not tags!

They are alternative text for when an image isn't displayed. For example the alt attribute of a photo of an exhaust linking to an exhausts review article should be something like "exhaust".

What you want is title attributes. The title of the same link should be longer and more descriptive - "Exhaust reviews article, 10 exhausts tested and rated".

Meta keywords are redundant these days. You might as well remove them all and save some space. I don't have them on any of my current sites. Meta descriptions carry no weight, but are useful as they are displayed as a summary in Google results when the keywords aren't part of the page text.

 

[Nightfire]

Also, if you're using a css layout, you can have the content show (in the source) above all the nonsense such as navigation, banners etc for search engines. Makes it increase your ranking quite well as there's no 'noise' and the searches are related to the content on your pages, instead of what the name of your header image is etc.

 

[Red Cup]

Won't make a difference. Just stick to the navigation before content. The best sites are perfectly readable with the CSS switched off. If you've done a good job your nav will be an UL or OL filled with relevant keywords in the title attributes.

There won't be any "noise" as if you're using a CSS layout the name of your header image will be in the CSS.

Also make correct use of heading elements, only one H1 per page etc.

Use good URIs and avoid querystrings, ie www.mysite.com/articles/exhaust-tests/ rather than www.mysite.com/article.php?id=3

 

[jon_r]

Arrrrgghhh!! They are ATTRIBUTES not tags!

Calm down dear, its only a forum.

 

[Weeman]

Geeks