Google Search Optimization 101

[Dominus]

Google Search Engine Optimization 101
http://forums.nekio.com/showthread.p...=7161#post7161

1. Write good appropriate content, and lots of it. Keeping your pages, especially index page, updated daily seems to help.
2. Use appropriate titles to help get the attention of the user when they see you in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
3. Provide an attractive, fast loading page so that you don't lose the user before your page finishes loading. Use table less layouts.
4. Use cascading style sheets css to position your most important elements at top, as well as helping to streamline pages by keeping design separate from content
5. Provide good, easy to follow navigation. it helps both the user and the Search Engines .
6. Make sure that your site is worth linking to. See all of the above.
7. Never write with only the Search Engines in mind. If it does not read well to a HUMAN, then that high listing is just wasting everyone's time.

Only when you have all of the above in good order should you worry about things like keyword density.

The next step:
Ranked by order of importance. (Results of course will vary, as will the algorithm)

1. Keyword in Title Meta tag - no more than 60 characters
2. Keyword in Description Meta tag - keep under 200 characters
3. Keyword in Body text- not just in body, but at least once in first paragraph, again in the middle, and again at the end of the body text. Google also loves fresh content. Update your page at least once a week.
4. Keyword density - 1-7% - No more, no less. Results will vary. You can use this keyword density analyzer
5. Page Rank/Links - best if from related sites with higher page ranks PRs.
6. Sufficient Content (Google seems to like bigger sites, more content)- content is more important than PR links. Without quality content, you won't get links, but you can get good ranking without links if you have good content
7. Keyword in incoming links (keywords in the URL not necessarily domain name)The point is "don't worry too much if your already established domain doesn't have a googleable keyword in it". Go for second best with shoving the keywords in the URL's.
8. Keyword in incoming link text
9. Keyword in text surrounding incoming link text
10. Keyword in <H1> tags and keyword in <h2> tags
11. Keyword in outgoing links - best if to related sites with higher PRs
12. Keyword in outgoing link text
13. Keyword in text surrounding outgoing link text
14. Keyword in alt image tags
15. Keyword in bold- hard to tell whether bold/italics would be more important than links, but I would definately include one bold keyword and one italic keyword on each page
16. Keyword in italics
17. Keyword in domain or sub domain name- it is more important to have the page/folder names include the keyword for that page and category. If you have one primary root keyword that covers your entire site, then using it in the domain won't hurt
18. Keyword in keywords Meta tag - Google doesn't use the keywords meta tag but other search engines do.

- NanoEntity
- http://www.nekio.com

Keywords:
best body bold content density domain engines good google important incoming keywords link links meta nekio optimization outgoing page pages results search sites text text user will anime gallery forums manga wallpaper art image

[Zachery]

the whole worrying about google spidering your pages went out when vb3 hit the market

google and other spiders are constantly spidering my pages

[Brad]

Provide an attractive, fast loading page so that you don't lose the user before your page finishes loading. Use table less layouts.

Table still have there place, the problem is using them as design tools whitch they where never intented to be. In a script like vBulletin you expect to find a <table> or two becase there is alot of stuff that is displayed in tabular form.

[Brad]

I wrote this for the modification tips and tricks forum that is no longer in use. Just some more info on search engines and bots.


Search engines, how they index your forum; and getting better results from them.

This article is a brief overview of search engines, how they work and what you can do as an admin to improve your results on sites like google.com

What are search engines and 'bots'?

Search engines are your friend, without search engines there would be no way to do research online. Search engines also help you (the webmaster) by bringing in hits.

Search engines use things called bots to 'crawl' your site, these bots visit your website and index them so the info from your site can later be searched via their engines.

Below are sections that explain how to get better results from bots and how to control what they crawl on your web-site.

Tip 1: Link exchange/submit your site

When bots spider sites they get around like any human, they click the links on the current page they are viewing. So, a good way to ensure more hits from a search engine bot is having your site linked from others. This is why starting up a link exchange with sites similar to yours is always a good idea.

You may also submit your URL directly to search engines so they may index them, here are a few links:

Submit to Google
Submit to AltaVista
Submit to Inktomi
Submit to AlltheWeb


Tip 2: Meta tags

Meta tags are used to allow search engines to index your pages more relevantly. We will only be dealing with two types of meta tags in this article, 'keywords' and 'descriptions'.

Keywords are just that, common words that someone might input into a search engine that relate to your site.

A description is also just that, a description of the content hosted on your web-site.

Say for example I was building a site based on soda, my meta tags might read something like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="soda,pepsi,coke" />
<meta name="description" content="This is a site all about soda ." />

--editing the meta tags in vBulletin v2

see: this thread

--editing the meta tags in vBulletin v3

v3 includes a way to do this from the admincp (without editing the templates), the options for controlling the meta tags are under the general settings in the vBulletin options area of the admin cp.

Tip 3: Spider Friendly URL's

this section is mostly for vB v2 users

Most search engines can not spider urls with query stings in them (? and & for example) or they will only go one string deep (for example showthread.php?t=1 is more likely to get spidered then showthread.php?do=showthread&threadid=1), vBulletin makes use of these in nearly every url it generates. However in vbulletin the session hash causes most of our troubles, and because spiders (bots) are guest at our forums they will get the session hash in there urls (vB 2 only, v3 strips them stock).

To solve these problems two hacks have been made, one converts all urls into friendly ones, the other strips the session hash but nothing more.

Also, both these hacks will not make the pages optimized for search engines, check out the next tip for more on that.

The spider friendly links hack

strip session hash from urls - google bot only

vBulletin version 3 uses shorter query strings on most pages (like in forums and threads) and also strips the sessionhash for bots stock.

Tip: 4: Archives

Archives are wonderful tools that make a spider bots life a lot easier! They are search engine optimized to allow the bots to index you more quickly.

For an example of an archive check out vBulletintemplates here: [click me]

Notice how that page has a simple layout, dose not use images, and uses friendly url's. All these things make this page 'optimized' for spider bots.

You can have an archive of your own by turning the option on in the control panel (vB 3 only), or installing an archive hack if you are running vB v2.

Tip 5: using robots.txt to save bandwidth

Like I have mentioned before, spiders (bots) are just like any guest. They will see everything a normal user would see including images.

But we can control what a bot can 'see' with a file called robots.txt. robots.txt is a file any spider checks for before it begins to spider the site, the spider is only allowed to do what it is told to in robots.txt

note: robot.txt is always uploaded to the ROOT public_html folder

So, with robots.txt we can dis-allow a bot from reading a file, for example the code below would dis-allow any bot from loading images on my site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/images/

Fell free to play around with this, you can also disallow files like so:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/usercp.php

And multiple things at once are also accepted:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/attachment.php
Disallow: /forum/avatar.php
Disallow: /forum/editpost.php
Disallow: /forum/member.php
Disallow: /forum/member2.php
Disallow: /forum/misc.php
Disallow: /forum/moderator.php
Disallow: /forum/newreply.php
Disallow: /forum/newthread.php
Disallow: /forum/online.php
Disallow: /forum/poll.php
Disallow: /forum/postings.php
Disallow: /forum/printthread.php
Disallow: /forum/private.php
Disallow: /forum/private2.php
Disallow: /forum/report.php
Disallow: /forum/search.php
Disallow: /forum/sendtofriend.php
Disallow: /forum/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forum/usercp.php
Disallow: /forum/admin/
Disallow: /forum/images/
Disallow: /forum/mod/

Tip 6: Don?t cheat!

The last thing you every want to do is cheat spiders, this can get you banned from many index's. Here are a few things you should never do.

- Hidden link to your archives
- Image link to archive without alt tag
- Do not use automatic search engine submitters