WebsiteX5.info - The ultimate guide for Incomedia's WebsiteX5

(Or how not to get lost on the internet...)

Search Engine Optimization really works!
That the simple techniques I will described on these page realy works is proven by the fact that it took me just three weeks to get my wives website (www.hoornbloem.nl) to position 1 on page 1 on Google on some of the most used combinations of search criteria for her profession. On a large number of other criteria her site shows up on the first page!

(Sorry, I couldn't resist showing you this... I am rather proud of it! ;-D )


Introduction
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a rather extensive subject, as I discovered during my six months of research to bump my own sites up in the Google Rankings. And even the specialists seem to disagree on a number of issues... This article describes some of the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the things that you can do yourself to enhance your page rankings...

The basics...
Once you have created your website then of course you want your work to be found by the major search engines like Google and Live Search. Preferably as the first result on the very first page. But that doesn't happen automatically. You have to do some really hard work to get a good ranking. Building the website often is the easy part. Getting it found, that's a whole different ball game! Books have been written on the subject and you could make a real study out of it. You can even use the services of professional companies to optimize your website. But there's also a lot you can do yourself...

Whether your pages are found by search engines and what ranking they will get seems to depend on a large number of variables, such as:

• The technical state of your website (no problem with WebsiteX5 ;-D)
• Does the title of your pages reflects their content?
• Is the description of your pages relevant for their content?
• Have you defined relevant keyword?
• Have you registered you webiste with search engines?
• Have you given your images an alt-tag?
• The number of links to your website from other sites which are considered relevant by the search engine?
• How good can your website be 'crawled'. Are all your pages reachable via internal links?
• Have you provided a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml?
• What is the age of your website?
• What is the update frequency of your website?
• What is the number of pages with relevant content your site contains?
• ??????

And even if you have taken care of everything it can still be quite frustrating. For example a Google search on 'london flower shops' finds about 874.000 hits! How can you get your site to the first page? Or, when you have created a perfect website on one interesting topic, chances are a websites shows up on the first page from somebody who has only one lousy page on an amateur website and your site shows up on page 86, or worse...

The exact way a page rank is calculated seems to be a well guarded secret, but a few parameters seems to be of a greater significance. These are:

• The title of the pages
• The description of the pages
• The Alt-texts on the images
• The number of links to your website
• robots.txt and a sitemap.xml.

And these are the parameters which we can influence ourselfs...

Before you continue I suggest you read the Googles excellent documentation for website owners. They contain interesting background information on the inner workings of search engines and they offer good advice on what to do and what not to do...

If you have any remarks on this topic, any suggestions for improvement or tips you want to share with others please don't hesitate to contac me via robert@websitex5.info.