Search Engine Cheat Sheet

We offer our talent a few tools to pool info about projects; this way we save time and work more cohesively. One of our first "Cheat Sheets" was about SEO (search engine optimization.) Since the purpose of our TalentEd blog is to present such knowledge, here are some of the greatest hits for SEO.

The main goal is to let the engine know when you should be displayed. It has to guess about your purpose. Provide goods hints.

KEYWORDS

• If you don't know what meta tags are then stop right here, that's your one lesson. Put a meta tag for keywords and another for description. You can also have a script dynamically insert keywords more appropriate for that specific page. PS: trying to double up words makes you look bad to search engine brains and wastes the small number of words you get.
• Make sure to use h1, h2, etc. tags. They are more semantic and help with search indexing. Engines only pick up one of each on the way through.
• The title tag in the head of your HTML document is also a premier way to describing the content with a simple title and some perfect keywords. Bonus point: if your title and h1 tag match, then the engine knows it must be true.
• Go find out which keywords to use. Examine competitors; be more awesome. Don't just guess.
• Repetitive keywords looking spam-ish? Search engines are real smart.

TAGS

• Use valid markup, otherwise the robots will get lost while viewing your site.
• Similarly, broken links make search engines, and people, frustrated.
• Use the alt attribute in your image tags so that blind people, and search engines, know what they would see.
• This goes double for image links. Include the title in link tags that surrounds images.
• Include the title tag for links in general... at least the important ones.

URLS

• If you're going to be content poor (small number of pages) then let your URL describe your purpose to some degree. (Large networks have the luxury of content to do the describing, i.e. Flickr, Facebook, Bebo)
• It's all about the prominence of descriptors, so get your URLs readable.
  If somone could read the address and understand where it will take them
  then you're golden, i.e.
  www.readydone.com/blog/jul-08/search-engine-cheat-sheet
• Often
  tied to URLs is your site structure. Make this logical and get yourself
  a site map. You can have a page do this or even better provide a link
  to an XML site map for the robots to eat up.

LINKS

A main factor in your relevancy is how many links come into your site and where they head to. The internet is a mesh of hyperlinked documents. You want to be a hub. There are lots of ways to get sites to link back to you... I recommend having great content.

Having a whole lot of great content will make you even more vauble.

Lastly, there are lots of other people trying to present their relevance to the web out there. They can be a great resource for exchange and sharing. Two web presences mingled is more than the sum of it's parts.

That's all you get.