What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation Tips Tutorial

Our SEO tutorial does not advocate or contain spam techniques to improve your rankings. We are often asked, "How do you achieve a top 20 ranking long-term?" Our standard reply is "build your web pages so they comply with search engine guidelines and only employ best practice methods to promote your site externally".

The search engines do not reveal their algorithms and only give you a general idea of what they consider when ranking a site, therefore SEO is a constant process of analysis, monitoring, and fine tuning.

Unfortunately, many web sites contain design components that are incompatible with search engine spiders. Most of these problems can be avoided by following some basic rules which ensure all or the pages in your web site can be indexed thoroughly by visiting search engine spider robots.

Is your site already indexed by the major search engines? How long ago did the search engine spider index your pages? How do you check if your site is being indexed by Google and how often?

Simple! Visit Google and enter this search site:www.yourdomain.com Google will display the total number of pages within your site it is currently indexing. If your web site has been online for some time and you can't see every page indexed, you may have elements within those pages preventing spider robots indexing them.

If your site is new, do not be alarmed if the site search at Google returns .....

'Your search - site: www.yourdomain.com - did not match any documents'.

This is normal until you either submit your site to the major search engines or a site that is already being indexed by Google, places a link to your home page or a page within your web site. The external link allows the spider robot to jump from their site into your home page or an internal page and begin indexing your web pages.

To check when each page was lasted indexed, look below each page title and description in the site search results and you will see a text link called ' Cached'. Click the link and Google will display your page as it was, when their spider robot indexed the web page. At the very top is the date and time your page was last indexed. e.g.

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.websight.net.au/ as retrieved on 17 May 2008 09:06:44 GMT.

You can also use the site search site:www.yourdomain.com to check your indexing status at ninemsn. To check your indexing status in the Yahoo search engine, visit Yahoo's Site Explorer and enter your domain name.

Over the next few pages of our search engine optimisation tutorial we discuss common problems and offer some solutions, and hopefully shed light on what are considered the most important elements of a typical search engine optimisation campaign.

To browse our SEO tutorial pages, follow the links at the bottom of each page or use the links in the right column headed SEO Tutorial.