How to Optimize a website - part 2

Optimizing your page.

All optimization begins with the same thing...... CONTENT. What you write on your page will affect how you rank.

Think of it this way, Google and the other big two, Yahoo and MSN which shall from now on be know as the GYM, are looking for good sites that contain good information for their searchers. Regardless of what you may think, Google is only a machine, a machine that can only count 1's and 0's. It justs visits each site and asks questions of it. If you provide the right answers then it will rank you well, if you answer incorrectly or not at all then you will not rank at all.

The GYM sites need words in order to decide what your site is about, without then it can't tell what you want to rank for so it will play it safe and rank you for nothing.

First things first, the GYM sites can't read images, it doesn't matter how good your picture or graphic is, they will only see a blank square, so bear this in mind in your design. Also watch out for links, flash and javascript links can look very nice and can be very clever in their execution, but the GYM sites can't follow them. They can only follow simple hyperlinks, which they also read the names of as they go. This will become important in a later lesson, but for now keep it simple, or....... if you have a flash wizz bang site, add a sitemap link and list your page urls on it so that the Gym sites can at least arrive on your pages and have a look at them.

In addition to this you should create a Google sitemap, but I will cover that in a future lesson.

In the next lesson we will discuss what information to put where on you home page so that it ranks as well as it can.