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Search Engine Optimization Cheat Sheet

by Stephen Peters
June 2, 2008

We're frequently asked how we get a web site to return well in search engines. Well, there's really three basic ways to optimize this:

  1. Pay for it. Yes, you can get better search engine results by throwing money at Google. It's called Google Adwords - https://adwords.google.com
  2. Build a site with the information your audience is looking for. Does your site have the relevant information your site visitors are looking for? Does it go into more depth than other sites? Is it better quality information than other sites? If not, they why would you expect to be more popular than the competition?
  3. Make sure the technical aspects of the pages are tuned well. There are some fairly straightforward guidelines on how to construct web pages so that the seach engines can "read" your text and return your pages when searchers are looking for your keywords. That's what this blog post is about.

If you're a web developer you probably already know most of these tricks. If you do only a little coding it's good to have this handy to guide your work. If you're just a customer wondering what search engine appropriate code looks like, the cheat sheet has good examples. In fact, in any browser you can do a "view source" and see what your HTML tags look like.

Most sites can get their search engine results improved by using a copy writer. Why? Well, for one thing your message needs to be focused on what visitors are looking for. That means writing for your audience, but it also means knowing how to craft the messages that go into the unseen tags that the search engines read.

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet by Danny Dover

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet

(note, this link will pop up in a new window)

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