SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

Chapter 3. Building Your Site for SEO

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Before you build your web site

• Understanding basic web-site optimization

• Components of an SEO-friendly site

• Web-site structure: Hierarchical and interlinked

• Problem pages and work-arounds

• Chapter 8 How programming languages affect SEO

• Other site-design concerns

• After your site is built

Search engine optimization is a collection of strategies that improve the level at which your web site is ranked in the results returned when a user searches for a key word or phrase.

By now, that's a definition you should be pretty familiar with. What you probably don't know (yet) is how to achieve SEO. You can't do it all at once. Instead, SEO has to happen in stages. If you try to implement too many strategies at one time, two things are going to happen.

First, you won't be able to tell which of your efforts are successful. Implementing one strategy at a time makes it possible for you to pinpoint which strategies are working and which are not.

Second, when you try to implement too many strategies at one time, your efforts—even the successful ones—could be lost in the shuffle. It's like having too many children running around the house on the weekend. If you're not paying complete attention to all of them (and that's virtually impossible), at least one is bound to get into something.

SEO is most successful when you concentrate on one effort at a time. A great place to start concentrating is on the way your site is built. One of the first things that attracts ...