Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I’ve recently started reading a book by Mike Monahan called “Search Engine Optimization Secrets: SEO for 2011″ in the hopes of understanding SEO better. I have yet to decide whether or not I will try and practice this on one of my sites.. I’ve no doubt they are horribly bad having never really looked into SEO before for any of them. My next series of posts will be related to SEO and contain notes taken from reading Mike Monahan’s book.

How do you get your Website to the first page of search results for a search engine? As you are probably already aware, there is no guarantees on anything in the search engine world but using SEO can always assure you get good results (particularly if you use a professional). SEO professionals have ways of determining the new algorithm changes for every industry on the major search engines. The algorithms are always changing which means that SEO is something that you have to keep up to date on your website.

It’s been proven that the top 20 search engine results get the most clicks as users will not go beyond page 2 of the results usually. First 3 results will get the highest clicks of all.

Microsoft’s BING search engine took over from Yahoo who supposidly just gave up when google had over 60% of the search engine market. Microsoft have sunk a bucket load of cash into advertising and stuff. They refer to their engine as a ‘Decision Engine’ and took over from Yahoo’s search results.

Using Robots.txt to stop pages from being crawled

Even if you block a page using ‘disallow’ tag in the Robots.txt, you might still get crawled via an external link or incoming link. Best way to go is to add a password so you need to log in to the page if you want to stop crawlers 100%.

What shows in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) typically?

Google’s algorithm will typically use the Meta description tag but it can also use matching lines or phrases from your search query especially if you use multiple word search queries (Long tail).

Influence of Bold and Heading tags on search engine results

Making your text bold doesn’t really help usually, however using the Heading <h1> etc. tags will help if you use them sparingly. <b> and <strong> will very occasionally help if not spammed over your site but no guarantees.