http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/ A Promotion forum thread at WPDFD.com en-us 01/16/04, 016 52 2004 2004:%i:1074275532 11:52:12 08/21/08, 234 35 2008 2008:%i:1219296931 00:35:31 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss NineLabs Framework Feed Generator sitemaster@wpdfd.com sitemaster@wpdfd.com http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p284 ]]> 01/16/04, 016 52 2004 2004:%i:1074275532 11:52:12 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p284 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p285 Google's developer page and you might not need to pay anyone! I didn't ]]> 01/16/04, 016 46 2004 2004:%i:1074278782 12:46:22 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p285 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p286
I learned most of the SEO techniques from about 3 weeks of finding online tutorials. If I can find the URLs of the sites I used I'll post them.

A word of warning about SEO. It is possible to go too far and actually get your site penalised by the search engines. Tricks like putting loads of irrelevant keywords on a page in the same colour as the background are considered bad practice and are not liked at Google and co. Some of the SEO companies use these techniques too so be careful. ]]> 01/18/04, 018 47 2004 2004:%i:1074466066 16:47:46 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p286 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p287
So here is what I recommend. GO through all your web pages and make sure TITLES and DESCRIPTIONS are appropriate. Then start your reading. SEO is more complex this year.

Good luck!]]> 01/30/04, 030 46 2004 2004:%i:1075484770 11:46:10 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p287 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p288
Is this considered bad practice?

Just curious..because aside from looking awful it did seem to help some clients.]]> 02/07/04, 038 29 2004 2004:%i:1076135386 00:29:46 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p288 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p289 http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html you will see that they take a dim view of any such tricks. In particular they say "Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings."

Such tricks will have exacly the opposite effect from what you think.]]> 02/07/04, 038 23 2004 2004:%i:1076145832 03:23:52 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p289 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p290 ]]> 02/07/04, 038 55 2004 2004:%i:1076176529 11:55:29 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p290 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p291 Mike]]> 02/26/04, 057 13 2004 2004:%i:1077804809 08:13:29 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p291 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p292 http://www.websites-design-uk.co.uk/ecommerce_web_designer_uk.php

That page redirects, wait for it to load and finish, then when it starts to go to the enxt page press the STOP button to take a look at it. If you have a slow connection like me you may have to repeat the loading untill it's all loaded in, it says copyright at the bottom.

This page is a doorway page to a real site that also spams.

This page pretends to be a Flash 'loading...' message, and redirects to the real page after pretending to load something.

This page is full of keyword spam, and I mean FULL.

This page uses a very tall trasnparent gif to push the words down the page where no-one looks (apart from me)!

This page seems to be targeting "web design __insert_uk_place_name__" where __insert_uk_place_name__ = just about any town and region!

This page and it's friends are on the 1st page of Google search results for "web design ipswich" - my target phrase!

Check out the google results if you target seach phrase is "web design _uk_place_name_" you may find these _insert_obcenity_here__ 's are your direct competition too!


]]> 02/26/04, 057 50 2004 2004:%i:1077843020 18:50:20 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p292 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p293
I advised against it, but she did it anyway.

What they did was add about 100 pages to the site along with about one billion invisible links to web sites that don't exist.

It's *really fun* to work on her Web site now. Just sorting through all those fake pages and fake code is enough to give me a headache.]]> 07/29/04, 211 52 2004 2004:%i:1091148732 19:52:12 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p293 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p294
Why don't you just offer to clean up her site and properly optimise it? It's more money in your pocket at the end of the day and your client will probably have a higher ranked site.]]> 07/30/04, 212 06 2004 2004:%i:1091196383 09:06:23 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p294 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p295
Meta tags are virtually useless. Google ignores them entirely, and Yahoo pays only a passing glance. About the  only way they seem to help is if EVERY word in them is in the content.

Which brings me to content. Once again, on the web, content is king. Better content gets results, and gets people to link to you.

Which brings me to backlinks. Backlinks are gold, especially for google. But they have to be good links, in context, not just random junk amidst a zillion other links.

Title tags are HUGE. BIG BIG difference. IF you do one thing, write REALLY good title tags

Start writing semantic markup. Google loves it. that mean h tags for headers, LI for list items, and so on. Make your code mean something.

Stop frittering away other opportunities, especially alt and title attributes on images. Not only does it make your page more accessible, but it makes it more spider-friendly. Remember, the spiders go through your page pretty much like a screen reader does.

Which brings me to the last point... view in a text browser. This lets you see what you're feeding the spiders. It also helps you build better, more accessible code.

I like this link:
http://access.ex.ac.uk/]]> 07/30/04, 212 47 2004 2004:%i:1091198836 09:47:16 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p295 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p296 Thanks
Dan]]> 08/10/04, 223 02 2004 2004:%i:1092135732 06:02:12 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p296 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p297 08/10/04, 223 36 2004 2004:%i:1092148597 09:36:37 http://www.wpdfd.com/forums/wpdfd/promotion/search_engines/#p297