SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

S

earch engine optimization is a collection of strategies that improve the

level at which your web site is ranked in the results returned when a

user searches for a key word or phrase.

By now, that’s a definition you should be pretty familiar with. What you proba-

bly don’t know (yet) is how to achieve SEO. You can’t do it all at once. Instead,

SEO has to happen in stages. If you try to implement too many strategies at

one time, two things are going to happen.

First, you won’t be able to tell which of your efforts are successful. Imple -

menting one strategy at a time makes it possible for you to pinpoint which

strategies are working and which are not.

Second, when you try to implement too many strategies at one time, your

efforts — even the successful ones — could be lost in the shuffle. It’s like hav-

ing too many children running around the house on the weekend. If you’re

not paying complete attention to all of them (and that’s virtually impossible),

at least one is bound to get into something.

SEO is most successful when you concentrate on one effort at a time. A great

place to start concentrating is on the way your site is built. One of the first

things that attracts a search engine crawler is the actual design of your site.

Tags, links, navigational structure, and content are just a few of the elements

that catch crawlers’ attention.

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IN THIS CHAPTER

Before You Build Your Site ..................................................................................................

Understanding Web-Site Optimization ................................................................................

optimization

Components of an SEO-Friendly Page ................................................................................

friendly site

Web-site structure: Hierarchical

and interlinked

Problem Pages and Work-Arounds ......................................................................................

How programming languages

affect SEO

Other Design Concerns ......................................................................................................

After Your Site Is Built ........................................................................................................

Building Your

Site for SEO

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