SEO - Search Engine Optimization

It's important to climb high on Google, Yahoo, and other popular search engines, becuse it will increase the chance of your website getting TARGETED visitors. There are several things that every webdeveloper should know about SEO.

First, you should make sure that your documents contains the meta-tags for keywords and description. Type down a small description of your site that contains some of your keywords. The main point is to pick words that are used frequently in your headlines in the document, but don't enter the same keywords twice (in the meta-tag). Some search-engines consider that spamming and your site might not be included in their database.

A good ten words should do the trick normally. There are downloadable SEO-tools on the net, if you like to analyze your keyword desity. Just try googling for "SEO tools" or something similar. Using all the analysis you can get is a good idea to be sure you have chosen the most relevant keywords possible for your documents.

Moving on, you can't build a site without having headlines (within the &&-tags). Try getting your headlines to contain some of your keywords as mentioned before, and use a headline for every page and/or block of text. That way you'll get the search engine to rank your page higher on relevant content. If you don't like the big text-size of the headlines, use cascading stylesheets to change the look of them. I've written a nice style example below.

An css exampe of changing the headlines

h1 {
font-family: tahoma, arial, verdana; color: grey; font-size: 0.95em; text-transform: uppercase;
}
There! Now it looks smaller and more blendable.

Consider buying a domain name?

Of personal experience owning your own domain-name, and especially one that contains one or more of your keywords, gets your site listed with the engines faster than not owning your own domain name. If you have a free hosting, you can be guaranteed that there are hundreds of similar named sites around, and you need to work pretty hard to climb the engines if you even get in. Free subdomain names means it's hard to get that name you really want, beacuse they are often allready used up.

Finally, one more tip that works like a charm to get listed and climb the ranks. The "all roads lead to Rome" - rule. If you can get more links to lead to your website than links leading out... and those links to be different from eachother, meaning changes in the texts of the links for example, then you'll get crawled to by the engines often, and the more ways that lead to you site, the more you'll climb the search engines. Search engines think that sites that other sites link to are very relevant, so those sites will climb high. This is more effective than reciprocal linking, but reciprocal linking works good too.