Search Engine Optimization Bible, Second Edition

Chapter 4. Building Your Site for SEO

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Before you build your site

• Understanding basic web site optimization

• Components of an SEO-friendly site

• Web site structure: hierarchical and interlinked

• Problem pages and work-arounds

• Programming languages and SEO

• Other site design concerns

• Validating your HTML

• After your site is built

Search engine optimization is a collection of strategies that improves the level at which your web site is ranked in the results returned when a user searches for a keyword or phrase.

By now, that's a definition you should be pretty familiar with. What you probably don't know (yet) is how to achieve SEO. You can't do it all at once. Instead, SEO has to happen in stages. If you try to implement too many strategies at one time, two things are going to happen:

• You won't be able to tell which of your strategies are successful. Implementing one strategy at a time makes it possible for you to pinpoint which strategies are working and which are not.

• When you try to implement too many strategies at one time, your efforts — even the successful ones — could be lost in the shuffle. It's like changing a recipe in multiple ways at once. Even if you like the result, you won't know which addition or deletion made the difference.

SEO is most successful when you concentrate on one effort at a time. A great place to start is on the way your site is built. One of the first things that attracts a search engine crawler is the actual design of your site. Tags, links, navigational ...