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27, May. 11: Sebastian's Games
Recently I have been adding loads of new games to my Sebastian Roberts (my brothers) website. There are a few non flash games there, but now there are loads off cool games from... more >>

13, May. 11: Technology Bloggers
A few months ago I gave up my technology blog in order to become part of a much bigger project. One month ago today, I launched a blog called Technology Bloggers. This was to become a fantastic... more >>

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Search Engine Optimization (seo)

Introduction

Search Engine Optimization (seo) is what you do to your website to make it more search engine friendly. It helps Search Engines view your website better, and will help to make sure that your site is associated with the right things. This will mean that when someone is searching for a page like yours, you come up in the SERPs - search engine results pages.

This will usually drive more traffic (a posh name for people) to your website, so your site will become more popular.

The 5 steps to SEO (basic)

To make it really easy to optimize your site, I have split the tasks down into 5 simple steps. This only covers the basics, but believe me, just doing this will help your site loads.

I did it on my site, which was nowhere in any of the search engines (and if it was, it was pages back) but now if your type my name into any major search engines I am top of the list! For further SEO help on how to increase your PageRank, please visit my How Can I Increase My PageRank? article on my technology blog

Step 1 Meta Tags

Meta Tags are things that you put in the header section (between the <head> and the </head> tags) of your site code. The table below shows the tag, what you should wright in it, and what it does.

Tag	What to put	What it does
<meta name="description" content="*">	Where the * is you should put a brief (15-25 words) description of your website.	This is usually what the search engines display below your site name on the results page, so making this good may pull in people to your site.
<meta name="author" content="*">	Where the * is put the name of the site designer, in my case I would put: Christopher Roberts	This tells search engines who made the website

Step 2 Speed Up Your Site

Speeding up your site is as important for users as it is for search engines, as without a speedy site, you are likely to loose a lot of visitors.

One thing you can do to speed up your site is to use style sheets. You can use these To put different colours and fonts into your website, rather that simple, older <strong>Text</strong> for bold text, and <font color="#0000FF">Text</font>for blue text etc. This helps to makes your site load quicker as in theory, you should have less code.

Try using the Google Page Speed for more speeding up tips, like shrinking images, altering cache levels etc.

Step 3 ALT Tags

By putting alt tags on your images, search engines can know what they are about, as they cannot read images, only text. Put the following code in the place indicated, to create an alt tag. <img src="Image location" *> image Place the following code, where the * is: alt="What the image is a picture of". The image bellow, is of Hong Kong Island, so if you mouse over the image, you will see it says this.

The code for this image is:<img src="http://www.christopher-roberts.co.uk/images/t1-3-2.jpg" alt="Hong Kong Island">

Step 4 Links

Search engines love links. Its a fact. Generally the more sites you have linking to you, the better your PageRank will be.

Step 5 Regular Updated Content

Content is very important, as the quality of it, and the freshness of it is taken into account. If you regularly update your site, you should do better in the search results.