Intermediate Search Engine Optimisation

Last week we have focused on Basic Search Engine Optimisation, this week we will be taking a step up and looking at more comprehensive ways of SEO.

I will be covering the following in this article:

• Dynamic / Static Links
• Alt Tags
• Robots
• Sitemap

As we have discussed in the previous article it is all about keywords and ensuring that your website is well described for search engines and for humans. Today we will focus on more in depth analysis of what search engines are looking at when they are crawling through your site, so lets start!

1. Dynamic / Static Links

   Dynamic Link: www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/gui.aspx?12938ds9828dj123d

   Static Link: www.prosperwebsolutions.co.uk/corporate-branding/

   Ok so whats the difference? Dynamic links don't really give much information to search engine, where static links will tell them that web page is talking about (in this case it is corporate-branding). Also, Google use to ignore dynamic links, this is no longer the case. However it is still not healthy to have dynamic links as they can effect your web page rankings massively.

2. Alt Tags

   When you have images on your website don't just add <img src="logo.gif"/> but add a alt tag, this is good for accessibility and also Google will have some kind of idea what image is all about. So do the following <img src="logo.gif" alt="your domain logo"/> this will also show image in the image search results when some one research for your domain logo.

3. Robots

   This is not very important, however it is good to tell search engines where to look and where not too. All you have to do is create text file document and upload it to your httpdocs folder. File should contain something like:

   User-agent: *

   Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml

   Disallow: /administration-section/

   This way Robots will know that they are allowed to spider the website, and they will see where sitemap is. Also they will know where it shouldn't look as sensitive information might be in place.

   Robots page should be located in www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt

4. Sitemap

   Now this is very important, if you want all web pages to indexed and if you want to ensure that it is done quickly then you defiantly require sitemap.

   First thing to do is register here:

   https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A//www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard&followup=http%3A//www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard&hl=en

   Sitemap should be located in the following area: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

   As you noticed it should be .xml file, this is how you should write it:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

   <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">

   <url>

   <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/</loc>

   <lastmod>5/16/2008</lastmod>

   <priority>0.5</priority>

   <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

   </url>

   <url>

   <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/page1/</loc>

   <lastmod>5/19/2008</lastmod>

   <priority>0.5</priority>

   <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

   </url>

   </urlset>

   You can literary take that and paste this it in to notepad and then save it as .xml . And just change www.youdmain.com and www.yourdomain.com/page1/ to your web pages. It is very simple but can make a significant difference to speed of indexing your website.

This was written by Zan Kavtaskin , Director of Prosper Web Solutions. Prosper Web Solutions is a web design Cheltenham .