Hosting Index: SEO Help - A Beginners guide

Technical terms used in this document.

Spider- Bot automated indexing programme.

Spidering the process of a spider visiting your site to grab the content.

Indexing the process of the content of your page being spidered and the content added to the search engine database.

Cache (ing) the adding of the information to the search engine data base.

Organic A generic term for search engine results that are not paid for.

SERP’s acronym for Search Engine Results Pages

PPC Acronym for Pay per Click, where you buy adverts on the basis you only pay if someone clicks on a link. Google Adwords & Overture are the most well known.

Algorithm A mathematical process used to determine the relevance of a page in the SERP’s. The Google algorithm has over 100 elements that all combine to allow Google to serve up relevant results.

Spamming Originally a term applied to unsolicited email, but has now been applied to the cheating of the search engine algorithms.

Keyword The main word or phrase that you are hoping to attract visitors to your page with.

Redirect the method of auto redirecting a visitor from one page to another. Most common are java script, and META refresh

What is a spider?
A spider or ‘Bot’, is a computer programme that traverses the web collecting links for indexing at a later date. Spiders find and follow links, and the more times it finds a link to a site, the more likely it will be to visit that link and actually index the content of the page. The caching of the content into the search engine database is what’s needed for your pages to stand any chance of appearing in a search

What are the top search engines?
The top search engines are Google, Yahoo & MSN these are the big three and control almost all of search in the English speaking world. There is an odd combination of supply of search results across many other search engines. For example, AOL uses Google results primarily for its organic SERP’s, MSN uses MSN search for organic results, but Overture for PPC ads.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it will give you a better idea of the state of play.
Google - Organic = Google
Paid = Google Adwords
Yahoo - Organic = Yahoo Search
Paid = Yahoo search Marketing
MSN - Organic = MSN search
Paid = Overture (although we have MSN adcentre coming online)
AOL/Lycos/IWON & Netscape all get paid and organic results from Google
AltaVista & All the web are now part of Yahoo and get their results from Yahoo & Overture.

I have heard you can cheat by doing <whatever> is this a good idea?
Cheating the search engines or spamming as it is known, is not a good idea, as they can get your domain banned, and once you are banned it is a very difficult task to get back into the index.

Things that can get you banned are:-

cloaking – the process of delivering one page to the spiders, and another to the viewer.
Invisible text where you use text of the same colour as the background to hide a load of spammed keywords stuffing.
Keyword stuffing, a process of using the keyword for that page repeatedly at every opportunity.
Doorway pages The process of creating many pages simply to appear on the SERP’s, often used in conjunction with a java script or meta refresh redirect. This also applies to owning multiple domains and redirecting.
Duplicate content Owning multiple pages or domains, all carrying the same content.
Cross linking Setting up multiple web sites purely to link back to your own site in order to boost its ranking.

In short, play by the rules, do everything right, and you will never run the risk getting banned, take risks and cheat, and one day you might wake up with no traffic to your site as you've been banned.

What is a title tag?
The title tag is one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. A title tag is essentially an HTML code snippet that creates the words that appear in the top bar of your Web browser.

The HTML code for a title tag looks like this:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Search Engine Optimisation Reports by Umbrella Consultancy</TITLE>
</HEAD>

The page title is what will appear in the SERP’s normally in blue, at the head of the listing. It serves two masters. First it is essential the title relates to and is specifically written for the content on each page. Secondly it must also be attractive to the human eye when it is read in the SERP’s.

What is a Meta tag?
A Meta tag is a piece of code that should reside in the HTML head area of your page. The main Metas are Description (title as above) and keywords see example below.

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Vacation Rental Villa Fort Meyers Beach Florida</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="A 4 bed vacation rental villa situated in Fort Meyers Florida ">
<META name="keywords" content="Vacation rental villa Fort Meyers Florida rental holiday">
</HEAD>

Do Meta tags still work?
The description Meta should always be used, and even though many search engines ignore the Keywords meta, I recommend it is used, as some smaller sites and many niche scripts use the keywords tag as part of their algorithm. BUT make sure you do not use the same description across the whole of the site.

This whole "tag" thing just baffles me.
Hopefully now you have a better idea, and are not so baffled.

Article written by Old Welsh Guy (James Christopher Edwards) who owns Umbrella Consultancy
Reproduced with permission.