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Written By: Joseph Gillespie Search Engine Optimization, more commonly referred to simply as SEO. It's one of, if not the, most important aspect of running a website today. Whether it be for business or personal, SEO matters. But what is it? Why is it so important? How do I get it? Well, hopefully these answers will be provided by the time you finishe reading this article. First and foremost, let's get some get some language skills in you. I 'm not going to go through every single acronym and important word in this article, because that would take a lot of time and it's already done for me here in the SEO Glossary. So go there and get a good bit of information on what a lot of common phrases and acronyms used in the SEO world mean. You'll probably learn a ton reading the glossary as well, and it will certainly make finishing this article a lot more pleasant. Ok, so you now know what a 301-Redirect is, and why Big Daddy may have affected you, right? If not, go read the Glossary already! All right, now let's look at the first thing that affects SEO - your website. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all of the other search engines use "Spiders" to "crawl" your website and put them into their search indices. A spider is NOT a human, it's a simple minded and procedurally operating script. This of course is not inreference the the AI Infused Search Engine I spoke of in another article. For the time being, let's just think of spiders as being simple minded. Most spiders rely on only two things, any special psider related tags/files, and the raw textual content on your site. That's it. The HTML, images, and personal care you give your site is completely ignored by the spider. All it cares about are what keywords it can find. So, when building your website, keep the content paramount to the site, and make it very accessible. Take a look at eKibitz, mostly text, and links to every area on every page. This makes the content easy to read for the spider, and easy for it navigate the whole site. That's what you should do. You may be wondering, what about this Page Rank or PR thing I hear so much about? Why is my site ridiculed for being PR2 compared to a PR6? How do I increase my PageRank? Well, the answer here is simple, the implementation sadly is not. PageRank is a Google exclusive, and one of the things that makes Google so special. A PageRank can be between 0 and 10, 0 being lowest and 10 being highest. Your PageRank is determined by how many other sites are linking to your site, and their PR. However, that's not to say getting 10 inbound links will give you a PR10. No, Google has a very special and EXTREMELY secret algorithm for generating PageRank. The two key factors are how many sites are linking to you, and the PR of the sites linking to you. If, for example, you had 10 sites linking to you, and they where all PR0 you might get a PR1 in the next update. However, if you had one site linking to oyu and it was PR7, you might get PR5 in the next update. Mix and match, and the outcome changes (note all of the numbers used here are completely made up, no one knows exactly how PR is generated except Google). A higher PageRank is good because it not only means you have a ton of exposure across the web, but you'll also get a higher ranking in Google's search. Ok, how do you increase PageRank? Simple, get other sites to link to you. Well, sounds simple. Google has a lot of checks in place to ensure you don't go out and put up 50 fake sites just to link to your site, so don't try that. Google also doesn't like spam, and some reports have indicated they will know if you've been spamming your link, so don't do that either. Neither of these should be done anyway because it's not nice, but if you don't care about being nice, at least know that google will try to find you and could give you the Google Death Penalty. So, some suggestions are add your link to any forum signatures you have (if it's allowed by the forum), purchase ad space (preferably text links) on higher PR (PR3-PR5 is usually a good starting point, and reasonably priced) sites, and put up a link wherever you legally can (talk to other webmasters you know and ask them to put a link on their site, etc). Finally, look at your Search Engine specific tags and files. Meta tags do NOT increase Search Engine ranking in most cases. However, it can be a way to add more keywords to your site and some search engines still look at them, so better to have them than not. You should have a working robots.txt file. This is just a simple text file named "robots.txt" uploaded to your main web directory (eg: ekibitz.com/robots.txt). Robots.txt contains directives telling the spiders what they can and can't do on your site. A good tutorial on the robots.txt file can be found here. If you use a dynamic script, such as one that generates a url similar to ekibitz.com/Resources/index.php?c=3 - you might also want to look into adding "mod_rewrite" to your site. mod_rewrite is a feature of the webserver that allows you to rewrite URLs to be more user, and search engine, friendly. A good use of mod_rewrite would turn http://www.ekibitz.com/Resources/index.php?c=3 into http://www.ekibitz.com/Resources/General/. Most modern search engines are working to increase the ability to spider pages with a dynamic URL, but it's still much better to use mod_rewrite or a script which doesn't generate dynamic URLs. Ok, well there you have. Some of the very basics of Search engine Optimization. Hopefully you will now be able to get out there and put your site, and enjoys the benefits of having a good Search Engine ranking, or high Page Rank. 
Last Modified: August 30th, 2006
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