SEO Optimisation

[Acuity]

I am in the process of building my new html portfolio website... is there any standard MUST-DO's that i should be doing on my end to optimize my prescence through search engines... pretty new to this whole game, so my knowledge doesnt extend much past submitting my site to free web directories... is there anything on the scripting end/layout etc etc i dunno, just standard things u guys do without even thinking....

Quick thought - I have an inital splash page - will throwing relevant content of some sort onto it help? i.e some text etc

[Toon]

Get rid of the splash page it's bad news and make sure the content is divided out using correctly worded h tags and text links rather than read more>>

[Acuity]

but then how do i make people choose between viewing my flash site and html site....ive seen other designers do the same thing and have a PR of 5/6 etc etc

[Toon]

PR and SEO are completely different things, if it's PR you're looking for I wouldn't bother. SEO is where you appear in the search engines and this is important to you build a html site but use flash elements don't build a full flash site if SEO is of importance.

[Acuity]

ah ok... i thought they went hand in hand or something, like one is used to help calculate the other...

ill give it some thought... thanks 4 the advice

[rossable]

this will be a little off topic...

i have heard that within the past few months or so that some Search Engine Optimization elemnts were depreciated. specifically it has come to my attention that meta keywords="" has been ditched from the criteria that the search engines use.

is this true, and if so what is replacing it/why should i still put it in my heads!?

[Toon]

Meta Keywords only count while used in comparison with the content, in theory the keywords, description, title and main content should all match and be different on every page, if things are repeated this is when it's ignored

[Toon]

Russ Jones summed it up best when he said:

“…but two pages with gibberish for content, one with a real keyword in a meta keywords tag, the other without… The one with the keyword will rank above. Which weigh’s more, an anvil, or an anvil with a feather?”

[Noli]

Ciao Acuity

In addition to what the guys have already advised, you will need to create a sitemap if you have not done so yet:

- Create an XML sitemap that conform to the following protocol.

- You can flag your sitemap to Googlebot and other crawlers through your robots.txt [see HOW TO]

- Alternatively, for faster results, you may use Google Webmasters Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer [or try to Google how to ping sitemap to search engines]


~ KEEP OPTIMISING~

[Acuity]

wow.... im having a dumb day - that sitemap protocal just threw me west

is it worth doing?