MilkAddict

Search engine optimization (SEO) means improving the volume and traffic quality to a website from search engines. SEO activities can include optimization of domain, layout, graphic, content.

It’s very important that your website is CSS and HTML/XHTML validated and it complies with Accessibility standards as well. This way your website not only will be available on all the browsers (Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc..) or even PDAs and smartphones but you will also have a website with less code, which is important in order to rank higher on the Search Engines.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) provides the guidelines by which websites and pages should be structured and created.

Here are then few guidelines to follow when optimizing a website for Search Engines like Google, Yahoo or Msn:

• Duplicate Content: Always write unique content! A common mistake when they start a blog or a website is to duplicate content, starting to copy text from other websites pasting it on their pages. This way Search Engines will lower the page rank, the ranking for keywords and eventually even ban them from the search results.
• Title – Description – Keywords: First of all always make a Title for every page, related to the content of the page eventually, because leaving the Title field empty decrease your position in Search Engines. Also in the head section of your HTML code use the META tags Description, to briefly describe what your website or page is about and Keywords, with a certain number of keywords related to the page.
• Written Content: Make sure that every page have about 200 – 300 characters of text, well written and related to the content of the website. You should use some of your keywords from the META tag in the text of the page and the keywords from the “title” and “description” in the h1, h2 and h3 tags. Also always write a description of the photo in the ALT tag of the images. Always use text and background’s combination that are easy to read (example: dark text on white or light background’s color).

Remember to think long-term.. as in Search Engine Optimization to be patient is the best way to success!