This is a continuation of the search engine optimization post.

Meeting and Exciding Search Engine Optimization Goals

We first need to understand that there are internal and external factors that determine where a page ranks and one without the other makes it more complicated at best and impossible at worst to rank for desired keywords.

I’ll start with internal components because the site needs to be accessible or it does no one any good. Accessible means that the site can be crawled, indexed and ranked.

Hosting – One thing to keep in mind is hosting. If the hosting company is unable to keep the site online 24 hours a day 7 days a week then the site is not accessible to the site visitors or the search engines.

Broken Links- If the links going from one page to the next are broken then the search engine spiders may never find those pages on your site to index them.
This is costing you PR and traffic as well as showing your site visitors your inability to do the simplest of things. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed and fixed.

Valid HTML – Regardless of what all the search engine optimization gurus tell you the site code does not have to validate however it does need to be clean and without errors. The search engine robot has to follow that code.

Page Link Code – If the site links are coded in a language the search engine cannot understand then they may never find those pages. This can cost you PR as well as traffic.

Page Size – In most cases the search engines will not fully cache a page that is over 150k in size. When it comes to search engine ranking it is important that every page and all its content be spidered and indexed and for this reason all pages need to be kept under 150K in size.
URLs, Title and Meta Tags

One of the first things that need to be done when setting up a page is using the keyword in the URL, title and Meta tag. These tags need to be as descriptive and brief as possible.

Search Engine Friendly Text

We need to understand that the search engines cannot read images, Java or Flash. If the search engines cannot spider this information then it want be used in ranking your site.

It’s important that we use the keyword throughout the page, beginning, middle and end. As well as using h1, bold text, italics and other things that make our main keywords standout.

Of course, do not over use this.