1. Search Engine Optimisation
CO6027 Week 19
Search Engine Optimisation

2. Topics What is SEO Keywords Links Metatags Content Images
Technical barriers
Dynamic URLs
Site promotion

3. What is SEO
A set of principles and techniques to assist with making a site rise up a search engine listing.
However:
Not all search engines work the same.
Not all web content works well with search engine ratings.
Paying for sponsored links (e.g. on Google) is not SEO.
If you don’t want your site indexing put a robots.txt file in it’s home folder.

4. Keywords Choose the right keywords Company name v Keyword domain names
Keyword density
Keyword placement
URLs and filenames
Title
Headings
Images
Body text

5. Links Inbound and Outbound links Outbound links to relevant sites
How inbound links affect rating
Number of links
Quality of links
Bartering links
Purchasing links and link farms
Pitfalls
Anchor text

6. Metatags
Early search engines used <meta> tags as the primary indexing mechanism.
Hardly used now.
You should include Description, Author and Keywords for accessibility.
Keywords gives you the opportunity to include variations of your keywords.
Robots <meta> tag used to exclude your page from indexing.

7. Content Content quality Relevance Regular updating Headings
Manual updating
Dynamic updates
Embedding news feeds
Headings
<b>, <i>,<strong> and <em> tags
Uniqueness

8. Images / Objects An image can’t be indexed It’s alternate text can!
Unless you count Google Images etc.
It’s alternate text can!
The title attribute not indexed
A meaningful filename will also help
The longdesc attribute
Images as links
Keywords in the alternate text
<object> fallback text

9. Technical barriers Search engines can only index text
Flash content is problematic
Some effort to make flash content accessible and index-able.
<script> elements not parsed
Don’t put content in Javascript write statements
If code is long put it in a .js file for efficiency

10. Dynamic URLs Dynamic URLs can be unfriendly to search engines
One URL that generates more than one page based on linking and context can’t be indexed properly
URLs with numeric Ids
New trend in URLs seen in most blogs
Title is in the URL

11. Site promotion
Try to get other (preferably high profile) sites to link to your site
Submit your site to search engines and directories and forums
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Paid entries
Sponsored links
Affiliate schemes
Etc.