Search Engine Optimisation, (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of altering a website's content and/or structure in order to help make the site's content more accessible to search engines 's content retrieval programs, (aka spiders, robots or crawlers), and improve how highly the site or one of its pages rank in search engine results.
Standard structural search engine optimisation often involves solving problems caused by the use or misuse of frames, JavaScript, Java of Flash navigation, session cookies, large amounts of text in images or anything else that stops search engines from seeing the stuff that they're interested in - text/copy/content. More advanced search engine optimisation looks at things such as file-path names and query strings, site-map format and the precise balance between the use of HTML tags versus CSS styling. On its own tinkering with a website's structure will often achieve very little without good content.
The optimisation of well written and original copy is pretty simple and the general rules of thumb are:
DO:
1. DO: Use a meaningful and accurate title for your document in the <TITLE> and in a heading tag, (e.g. <h1>, <h2>, etc.).
2. DO: Write an objective description of your document for use in the description META tag, preferably something that would be accepted by DMOZ.org or Zeal.com.
3. DO: Use simple, standard inline HTML tags for emphasis, (<b>, <strong>, <em>, <i>, <ul>, etc.).
DON'T:
1. DON'T: Try to show the search engines one thing and your visitors another. A recent casualty of this practice known as 'cloaking', (I blame the Klingons), is BMW.de which lost all Google ranking privileges once the site's nefarious activities had been rumbled. You might get away with one cheap trick or other for a while but sooner or later your site will probably find itself left out in the cold and for a lot longer than its time in the sun.
2. DON'T: Think about search engines first and your audience second. Content written with one on Google's listings is often stilted and dry, if not shallow and meaningless. It's the search engines' job to match searches with the best available results and if you want to rank well your job is to genuinely be a good result.
3. DON'T: Spam your own website. Many people will be familiar with the term SPAM for describing unwanted and bogus email but it also describes the increasingly common practice of padding a website with equally unwanted and bogus content.