Comments on: Search Engine Optimization Basics

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:40:57 +0000

Yeah well spotted. The issue I have is that my current host don’t currently support mod_rewrite and the php methods I’ve attempted to integrate into Wordpress don’t seem to work all that well.

So… my next task is to find another host

By: nitinpai

nitinpai — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:26:17 +0000

Dave,

You say,

The address of the web page is extremely important to search engines. A domain name with a specific key phrase will significantly help a page to rank well. Failing that, using a folder structure with names relating to the particular content and key phrases is a great way to go and the major search engines will certainly use this as a factor within their search engine results pages.

… but I just was surprised to see thr URL of this post itself. Aren’t your contradicting yourself?

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 08:50:00 +0000

Hi Joe,

I arrived at that conclusion, not from looking at Google’s search results but simply through experience of browsing the web.

Often when visiting a site, I’ll be curious to see how the site is built and the code used and a simple look into the source code is all it takes to satisfy my curiosity.

It’s here that it’s clearly obvious that many of the sites I visit don’t use all or sometimes any of the methods I’ve described above.

I agree that Google doesn’t necessarily show all the results that it claims but I believe this is an initial estimate and it also emits any results that are similar to those returned which could explain the inaccuracy.

By: Joe Hepperle

Joe Hepperle — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:54:10 +0000

Everything you wrote here is enlightening and refreshing. Your premise is that many web site owners do a terrible job at SEO. But, I’m not sure how you arrived at that conclusion — even though you have clearly described what they are doing wrong. Here’s the LOGIC problem: If they have bad SEO, how would you know? In theory, all of ‘their’ pages would be listed way back at result number 435,587 or result number 1,329. Did you surf all the way back to the end of a particular search result to get examples of ‘bad’ SEO pages? By the way, when Google et al. say there are 2,345,987 results for ‘Hobnobbing with the Rich’, I think they are lying. Have you ever tried to go to result number 23,497 or any result past 2 or 3 hundred? Can’t be done! They don’t exist! I think they proportionately multiply the actual number of results by some formula to end up with extremely large numbers that are proportionately correlative to the actual, lower, number of real results. Am I a whacko or what?

By: Jermayn Parker

Jermayn Parker — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:27:47 +0000

Yeah I personally would not worry about meta tags either, so yesterday

how you write your URL is a big factor. The title, headings, anchor text etc is for the user but the URL is for the computer. If you use WP I would definately suggest some suggestions etc with using the slug (url) etc

Looking forward to your seo articles though

By: Joseph

Joseph — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:18:02 +0000

Dave –
I’ve beaten myself ragged writing meta tags that didn’t seem to help my SEO efforts. Also, using .htaccess files to rewrite URLs to more SEO friendly names really has helped my database-driven sites. Thanks for the concise list.