Making your site Search Engine Friendly
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Why create a Search Engine Friendly Site?[edit]
To start off this article, I want to give an answer to this question. If your Web site is anything like mine, then your biggest visitor is an engine bot. In order to add your page, a search engine (like Google) will send out "crawlers" or "bots" to harvest your pages. These bots cannot harvest things that are created/triggered by javascript, or 'see' images (though they do check alt tags) and don't play well with flash files if at all. While all these things may make the site look better, they do little to nothing in terms of SEO (search engine optimisation).
Keywords[edit]
More about keyword density than the meta tag which is largely ignored by large search engines.
Use Semantic HTML[edit]
Use semantic HTML - only 1 H1 per page for the most important header etc.
Use links in your content[edit]
Have good links inline in text (articles) and avoid the use of things like 'click here' as the text that displays for a link. You want to try and have something that conveys the gist of the content of the page that the link points to.
[edit]
having a good navigation system is hugely beneficial for allowings bots to effectively crawl your site. (joomla goes a long way for doing this for you when used correctly so thats a big bonus).
Have a sitemap[edit]
Sitemap?
Things to remember[edit]
That anything that requires a login will not be 'seen' by a search engine.
That this article only just starts to scrape the surface.
That frequent maintenance and updates are a big part of SEO.
That SEO is only the start - it might help people find your site through search engines but you've got to work out how to get them to stay or come back or use your site.