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Created: Saturday, 05 October 2013 Written by Ehab Eldeeb
As I wrote yesterday on my Facebook
SEO in a nutshell:
- create a sitemap
- make your urls "readable"
- never duplicate your content
- update your content at least twice a week or so (add articles and stuff)
- use meta descriptions
that's it..
So I'll post some of what I've learnt about SEO
Hint: You must have a Google Webmasters Tools account
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.
Source: sitemaps.org
Let me ask you, is it better to have my url as..
ehabeldeeb.com/content.php?page=5&article=3&post=23
or would it be better if it was..
ehabeldeeb.com/article/SEO
??
For sure you will like the second one better, The more you make it "readable" is always better..
By saying "duplicated content" I don't mean creating 20 articles with the same information written in them
Duplicated content is simply the same page but with more than one url pointing to them
What? Let's see this example:
ehabeldeeb.com/about.php
ehabeldeeb.com/about.php?page=me
ehabeldeeb.com/about.php?page=ehab
Assuming that the parameter "page" doesn't change the content of the article
that's what I mean, use htaccess redirects to control this duplication, preferably 301 Redirects (permanent redirects)
For sure, crawler bots always need to do their job, they must find new stuff to add to the search engine index
The more content you add, the more crawling is likely to happen on your site
Meta description is simply a description of what a page contains..
it's not shown in the browser or the "interface" that the user sees, but if you view the page's "source" you will find something like:
<meta name="description" content="........." />
<meta name="keywords" content="........." />
Some search engines use the meta description to describe what the page contains
Other engines just take a block of text from the page and use it as a description
So it's better to have meta description and keywords on all pages of your site
Hint: Use meaningful descriptions and keywords
Use robots.txt for disallowing specific url's from being indexed
Read about robots.txt and how to create a robots.txt file on this page: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
After you successfully create your robots.txt file, check it with this useful tool for syntax errors
You should read This PDF File, supplied by google under the name of "SEO Starter Guide"