[thelist] Search Engines

[Shirley Kaiser, SKDesigns]

Joel,

I'm not Martin ;-)  but I do have lots of experience with this as a web 
designer, developer. Designing for search engines is part of my specialty. 
At times I partner with SEO experts to let them do their thing with 
registrations, but primarily I do all this myself for my clients' 
commercial sites. I do similar approaches with my own sites, and I've found 
it all works very well indeed.

Martin gives a good list of goodies in his note. I also wrote an article 
for Digital Web that I mention in another note here that lists these things 
and lots more, with resources and further details, if you're interested in 
checking this out further.

>Designing for Search Engines and Stars
>http://www.digital-web.com/tutorials/tutorial_2001-4.shtml

Warmly,
Shirley

At 07:31 AM 11/22/2001, you wrote:
>Hey Martin - just curious if this plan really works. You're the voice of
>experience, not theory, right? Most folks seem to insist that SE
>rankings are based on the infinite efforts of specialists. I've always
>thought it should be as simple as you describe, but don't have enough
>experience with commercial sites to know.
>
>Re: alt text on spacers - you're saying 'put in the alt text tag, but
>leave it empty' right?
>
>joel at spinhead.com
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
>[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of
>martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
>Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2001 2:10 AM
>To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
>Subject: Re: [thelist] Search Engines
>
>
>
>Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers
>
>-------------------- Start of message text --------------------
>
>[ . . . ]
>
>To make your site search engine-friendly is pretty simple:
>1) Be what your audience is looking for (ie have good content)
>
>2) Make sure that the SE spider can understand what your content is
>about
>     by parsing the text. So mark everything up with semantic HTML (ie
><h1>
>     rather than <p class="bigbold">), make sure that your pages have
>clear,
>     simple titles which say what the page is about, alt-text every image
>apart from
>     spacers.
>
>3) Pursuade people to link to your site (does wonders for the Google
>ranking)
>
>4) Don't, don't, don't feed content to the SE which users can't see.
>This includes
>     text the same colour as the background and server-side tricks (known
>as cloaking).
>     These things *will* get you removed from SE indices.
>
>Cheers
>Martin

-- 
Shirley E. Kaiser, M.A.
SKDesigns  mailto:skaiser at skdesigns.com
Website Design, Development  http://www.skdesigns.com/
Pianist, Composer  http://www.shirleykaiser.com/
Brainstorms and Raves http://www.brainstormsandraves.com/
Moderator, I-Design http://www.adventive.com/lists/idesign/summary.html