Horrie is today teaching us about the wonders of search engines such as Google.We started off the lecture by looking at a website called Alexa, which is a Web Information Company that provides an 'unparalleled database' of information about websites, including statistics. By searching a particular website on Alexa - such as the website for the University of Winchester - we can view its traffic statistics, the search words driving traffic, where it's users come from and where it ranks around the world. As it turns out, www.winchester.ac.uk isn't very popular, and Horrie predicts that this is because of it' poor SEO - Search Engine Optimization. It's keywords are rubbish and it doesn't have any links, etc.
For my blog to incur lots of traffic, it is essential to improve my SEO.
Search engines such as Google do not 'search', instead they are a filing system. This filing system is compiled by special software robots called spiders (a process called web crawling), which build lists of words from websites in order to index them. Once spidered, your website will appear on a search that hits any of your keywords. To improve your ranking on the search (SEO) you can:
1. Use your keywords in your domain name
2. Make your content relevant to to the search results
3. Update your content regularly, which will increase how often your website gets 'crawled'
4. Link your pages internally to ensure all your pages get spidered
5. Get others to link to your site - this will improve your ranking as Google perceives sites with lots of back links as high quality
6. Research what keywords are searched when people search fr your product/subject of interest
7. Keep your code clean
8. Avoid using flash (spiders can't read flash)
Photograph: Tube Spider
Photographer: Catherine Hayes
Link: http://www.redorbit.com/ed
