HTML

[~SaSQuAtCH~]

I recon some of you guys are into HTML.
I've made a website but there's one thing it still lacks. I'd like Google to lead me to that website when entering some keywords. How do I make that possible? Any help would be much appreciated.

[Mr. Tastix]

What do you mean? So say I searched Google for DXALPHA and it actually leads me to here?

[~SaSQuAtCH~]

ye exactly

[Mr. Tastix]

Possible in a sense, though I don't know how to do it. There are already multiple ways to do it but only one would be on your site.

1. Just use the address bar. I know in Firefox the address bar acts as a Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

2. Sign up for Google AdSense, create a Google search bar for your website, then try and change the "Search" button to work like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button from Google.com.

[Alex]

Possible in a sense, though I don't know how to do it. There are already multiple ways to do it but only one would be on your site.

1. Just use the address bar. I know in Firefox the address bar acts as a Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

2. Sign up for Google AdSense, create a Google search bar for your website, then try and change the "Search" button to work like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button from Google.com.

That's not what he means.

I recon some of you guys are into HTML.
I've made a website but there's one thing it still lacks. I'd like Google to lead me to that website when entering some keywords. How do I make that possible? Any help would be much appreciated.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=SEO

[Dae]

It's called search engine optimization (SEO), some basic rules of it are (in random order, off the top of my head):

— always use heading tags for headings (h1, h2, h3... h6) instead of your own styles
— don't hesitate to use bold and italic (html tags strong and em) in the text where needed, additionally you can highlight some important keywords
— use title tag, meta description and meta keywords, preferably dynamic for each page of the site
— make sure cross-linking is good on the site, so each page can be reachable from more than one page
— become friends with other sites, so they would provide a link to you, add your site to forum signatures etc
— make sure links are done properly, i.e. "click here" is a bad example
— generate user site map, sitemap.xml, robots.txt
— use clean URLs, such as "about-my-company.html" or "/about" but not "viewpage.php?id=420342"
— and finally, add it to the search engine, e.g. http://www.google.com/addurl but keep in mind this is not the most important step.
<s>or just hire me xD</s>

[Mr. Tastix]

That's not what he means.

I put two and two together and got three, meh. So sue me.

Also, what Dae said. Personally, I don't see why some webmasters think SEO is hard. It's not THAT difficult and most of the effective methods are rather simple to do. And free.

[Dae]

Also, what Dae said. Personally, I don't see why some webmasters think SEO is hard. It's not THAT difficult and most of the effective methods are rather simple to do. And free.

The aforementioned list is the minimum which is indeed quite simple to implement. SEO becomes difficult when all the competitors did the same thing long before you.

[~SaSQuAtCH~]

Thanks Dae, I think that helps, I'll get back here when I'm done with what you've said. If you have any other ideas in the meantime, please don't hesitate.

[Mr. Tastix]

Also, what Dae said. Personally, I don't see why some webmasters think SEO is hard. It's not THAT difficult and most of the effective methods are rather simple to do. And free.

The aforementioned list is the minimum which is indeed quite simple to implement. SEO becomes difficult when all the competitors did the same thing long before you.

Yeah, basically. It helps if you have a decent user-base too. I'm lucky for the simple fact that, whilst WowHumor doesn't have thousands upon thousands of visitors coming on a daily basis, it still has enough that searching up terms like "funny warcraft pictures" or "world of warcraft funny images" comes up with WowHumor on the first page (usually the first result).

[~SaSQuAtCH~]

— generate user site map, sitemap.xml, robots.txt

How do I do that and what does it do?

[Mr. Tastix]

http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

The robots.txt file can be used to stop certain bots from crawling your site, or to stop bots from crawling specific sections of your site (which I should really do), or vice versa (allow certain bots to see sections of your site). An example of one can be seen here: http://google.com/robots.txt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemaps

I don't know much about Sitemaps except that I should really be using one. In a nutshell (quoted from the above article; "Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol."

"It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently."

For an example of one, look here: http://www.google.com/sitemap.xml

Google's Webmaster Tools has a section on creating Sitemaps: http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... wer=156184

And I just found out that one of my sites was ranked in 4th position for the search term "casper the ghost porn" and 5th for "lil chris penis". First off, who search for that shit? And secondly, how does a forum about cooperative gaming have ANYTHING to do Casper the Ghost porn?!

That's what I'd call bad SEO on my part.