Nowadays SEO tips are echoed all over the internet. Everyone has a preconceived list of how to improve the page rank of their sites.

However, as programmer, i have to focus on the technical needs of the site and how to achieve wide audience, by being searchable. The best way is to assimilate these wise words.



“Search engines want to return relevant and useful results for searchers. All you really need to do is look at your site through the eyes of your audience. What do they see when they get to your site? Can they easily find what they’re looking for? Webmasters are looking for some other secret key, but really, that’s all there is to it.”
Vanessa Fox, Google ex-Webmaster Central Product Manager

Googlebot and others search engine bots have to be interpreted as our worst users. Users that are always complaining because they don’t found nothing relevant in our site. These typical users don’t have patience to turn the book pages to read more things. At the first sight they need to associate some sense and reference to something or they easily forget. We don’t want to be forgotten. Users that don’t found nothing relevant doesn’t come back is a fact. The same happens with the search engine bots they put ours sites in the end.

They appreciate the free HTML portions but if you deliver everything wrapped in a global comprehensive way, the state of nirvana is achieved by them.

For these guys we have to deliver always the best on a silver plate. If we conquer them we will get it all.

Heres my list, ordered in descending importance:

1. Start with a good architectural basis

Content embedded in different technologies or a mess of links that a search engine cannot understand or reach at all is useless.  Focus on creating one authoritative URL per page, and avoid embedding copy in less-indexable technologies as Flash and JavaScript. Search engines deal best with a copy that is obviously visible in the source of an HTML document. Don’t forget if you must have an Flash site, you must also make an HTML version available as well an block the Flash version from the crawlers with a robots.txt file.

2. Avoid the use of the same title and content description in all pages

Using the same title tag and content description for every page in a dynamic web site is a common mistake. One could reasonably posit that a search engine should ignore this in favor of other valuable content on the page. However, a search engine must not only factor actual relevance in to its algorithms — it must also factor perceived relevance. The title of a page dominates the space of an item on a search engine results page. The title will not contribute positively to a search engine user’s perception of relevance, and such pages are likely relegated to a lower priority in an index. The content description and keywords may be a resume or a list of relevant tags the page refers to it. Don´t use long text in these fields 200 characters is enough.

3. Readable URL’s

Use dashes over underscores to delimit words in urls. Lots of computer programming languages have variables using undescores. Example _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″. Give meaning to the page section on the URL like “http//:www.myblog.com/blog/post/title-of-the post”. Use user-friendly URLs like “african-elephants.html” and not “343432ffsdfsdfdfasffgddddd.html”. If possible minimize the number of URL parameters — 1-2 parameters if possible. Don’t use a parameter named “id=” in a URL for anything other than a session ID. Otherwise, it may not be included in the index.

4. Write useful persuasive copy with natural interposition of key phrases

Search engine optimization does not entail the needless repetition of keywords to end of search engine optimization. Copy that is excessively search engine optimized reads like it is search engine optimized! Keyword stuffing like this has not been effective to the end of search engine optimization since 1999 or so. Instead, focus on writing useful persuasive copy that creatively includes the key phrases your clients are looking for.

5. Include content on all pages

Many dynamic web sites create a vast number of web pages with various permutations of products and/or services using a database. Often this looks like a spider trap to search engines and they may not index such pages. If possible, include an excepted section of relevant copy from each product on the page based on the category. This will help substantially with regard to perception and possibly also contribute to long-tail rankings.

6. Hiding content is not good

Hiding text using similar colors and background colors can actually be worse than using the same colors. Using “#EEEEEE” instead of solid white on a solid white background can look worse — as if you’re trying to hide it.  I suspect this is a heuristic for detecting hidden text, since 2005.
The other thing is the fact that search bots can only crawl the free portions that non-subscribed users can access since it does not log in.  Therefore, be sure to excerpt material in the free version that are in those sections and offers value.

7. Links is a big issue

If you have a lists of links, you should use rel=”nofollow”. Otherwise your reputation may fall.  I assume this means they will devalue your outbound links. Avoid being penalised is and start using the rel=”nofollow”. Sites that sell links can lose their trust by search engines in the long tail.
Minimize the number of redirects upon hitting a URL. External (domainA -> domainB) 302 redirects are largely treated as 301s now. The search engines treat 404s (Gone, but may reappear) as 410s (Gone, but will not reappear).

Following these tips will probably help you rank better, and make your site more user friendly to be found by your target audience.