Jem’s Top Five SEO Tips
Before I get on to the actual point of the post: my new domains have propagated for the majority and you can now get to my site through jemjabella.co.uk, .com, .net and .org. HOORAH.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of optimising your website to increase your rank in search engines (not just Google, although I aim for high rankings in this primarily.) Here are some tips I’ve figured out through trial and error, or just generally heard work well. Starting from number 5…
Tip #5: Quality Content
I mentioned in my Promoting Your Website semi-satirical article that you should: “Have an Opinion
” and “Get a Blog, Blog About Everything
” and I believe this is part of the quality content thing. Quality content means content that people are going to want to read, and want to tell their friends about. Don’t go and copy a few tutorials from somewhere crap like pixelfx because that’s not quality content (and because Google penalises people for duplicate content anyway).
Tip #4: Link to Yourself and do it Properly
Take a look at this post: already I’ve linked to myself/my pages 5 times. That kind of internal linking scheme creates structure, and allows page rank from your main page to infiltrate your ‘lower’ pages. It also allows newer visitors that haven’t been a loyal reader for years to get to know your older content.
Link to yourself properly, too: don’t link to your index page as index.php or index.html, link to your domain name. This allows Google to properly assign page rank to your domain (that everyone else links to) giving you an overall higher page rank… well, it worked for me. Link to archives, old posts, articles, new pages: everything, baby!
Tip #3: Keep your Copy Clear and Concise
Copy is the ‘technical’ term for the crap you write (I just used it because it alliterates nicely)… i.e. the stuff you put on your website. Keep it clear and most importantly: make sure it makes sense! Not all of your readers are going to be English/American which means they need to be able to make out the important bits in what you’re saying.
To repolish my hypercritical microscope, I thought an appropriate awakening necessitated a string of spit sliding down the farcical frontispiece of an advertising ace.
..sounds romantic enough, but that barely makes sense to me — how the hell is someone who only speaks 3 sentences of English going to be able to grasp the “point” from that? (Sorry Sapphire, love you really.)
Tip #2: Make Your URLs Search Engine Friendly
Although this site has relatively scruffy URLs, not using post.php?id=1234 for my blog entries by default was the (almost) best decision I ever made. I get loads more hits from search engines picking up keywords in my URL now back then I ever did using WordPress without any permalink structure. Oh, and apparently you’re supposed to use dashes (hypens) and not underscores to suggest a space, but I have had no problem with my underscores.
Tip #1: Give Each Page its own Title
BEST ADVICE EVER. I can’t emphasise this enough: do not rely on “blablabla.com” for your title on every page of your website. The best thing I ever did for my website was start to identify pages individually with their own titles. Google loves it! Not only can it find keywords in my URLs and articles but my titles too. It also encourages people to link to pages using the right title, which I’ve heard is better than tons of generic same-name links.
If you use PHP includes to give each page a generic header, there are two methods you can use to customise your page title and if you use WordPress, make sure your <title> in the header.php file of your theme looks a bit like this: <title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?< » <?php wp_title(); ?></title>
Take heed, my beauties, and bask in the warm glow that is a higher ranking on Google (and when you hit number one and become rich and famous, remember who got you there people).
Oct 12th, 06 @ 20:02 · 
SEO
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I was tempted to get the com/net/us version of my domain, but I’m far too lazy and cheap to buy any of them. Though if I come across some godaddy or namecheap, I might invest in them. The last time I checked, I think I was 4 out of 10, but that’s honestly because I haven’t even tried to get my pagerank up. But as of late I’ve been pretty into stats, my vistors, and keeping them up and happy, as well as getting more. However, at least this article wasn’t like reading webworkshop.net/pagerank.html. I nearly shat myself at how it all works, and figured I’d prefer the “for dummies” version of it all.
Thank…you…so…much… Ok, I hope that didn’t sound sarcastic because it wasn’t meant to be. I never actually thought about it that much, truth be told.
I laughed at the Sapphire comment.
I’d do the tip #1 but I’m using Jack’s static pages.
Nice tips, especially the one for Wordpress.
I’m a big fan of #1, but I’m doing a different method so you know which subfolder you’re in as well, so it’s like Luve-me.net »(if that works) Domain » Links Out, and so on, that’s a plug you can use. I would give a link if I could find it.
Lol, doesn’t but I think you can guess what it looks like. I also wanted to ask, when you say link to yourself properly, you mean like the full link, not something like /about/me/etc but the full http://mysite/about/me/etc?
Ah, that sounds good. I think I can set up Expression Engine to give all my entries titles, and I know I meant to.. time to implement that when I clean my code up (now that I know what I’m doing!)
I think the importance of page titles, which shouldn’t even *need* stressing, illustrates what a bad habit ‘header’ includes are. Putting templated page content in an include file is one thing. Putting a HTML document’s [head] section into an include file defeats the purpose of having metadata.
@Gemma: I agree and disagree. Includes make people lazy and therefore perhaps shouldn’t be used as much, but at the same time there’s no reason that they can’t put the meta tags/etc into includes and still customise them fully. I personally have three variables which I can customise before I include my header - meta keywords, meta description and subtitle. These are then echo-ed (if changed) within the header or, if I am not feeling imaginative enough to make a custom title, are left as default. Works a treat for me
@Corinne: I don’t know if it matters where you do a relative link (personal/fanlistings.php) or a full link (http://www.jemjabella.co.uk/personal/fanlistings.php), as long as you keep linking to yourself. I use a full link because I’m lazy and use Firefox’ right-click “Copy Link Location” if I want to link to something, which grabs the full URL for me.
Thank you so much Jem! Great:D I also found this for wordpress users http://www.dech.co.uk/2005/11/ultimate-wordpress-seo-tips/
I need to figure out how to to change the meta tags for each page, too. -_- I feel something manual coming up.
If you wanted to capitalize the first letter of each WORD (in your first example), wouldn’t it was ucwords instead of ucfirst? Like, the way I understand the example is that you mean the tutorial to take a_title_here and make it A Title Here but with ucfirst wouldn’t it be A title here? MAYBE I am just on crack! Nay doesn’t KNOW PHP, she’s slinking away now in horror.
@Renay: you’re totally right. No idea how I missed that mistake, hah.
Hey great tips, just launched my website, and I stupidly purchased an articles script which utilised too much php’age ie faq_qanda?100045. Enough said LOL! so that has now been relegated to the site FAQ only, as indexing wasnt going to plan really due to created on the fly pages
Gah well decided to scrap that for my main content and have been shlaving away at my keyboard setting up endless contents pages and separate articles pages since….. but hopefully having read your great help above, I have not wasted my time and that you have just clarified that I AM heading in the right direction….. so cheers must goto Jem 
One question though! (arrrgh) Do search engines take into account for directories? ie sitename.com/web-design/how-to-make-websites.php? in terms of seo?
[...] be interested in Search Engine Optimisation. It is a smart idea to learn the basics (for example: 1,2,3) and get into good habits. This in turn will bring you more visitors in the long [...]