Web Log of Greg Mathews

When optimising your site for SEO, do not optimise it for one particular search engine and forget the rest.

Optimising a site for SEO is important but in my opinion you need to optimise it so it is good for a number of search engines rather than just the one. There are a lot of people that beleive that as Google is the number one search engine then they should design their site so it gets better positions in Google. At they same time they forget about the other search engines.

I look at my site stats for a particular site of mine and this month 80% of my search engine traffic came from Google, this means that 20% is coming from searche engines such as yahoo, MSN and AOL aswell as a large number of smaller engines (although many of them use the Google or Yahoo engines).

If my site was optimized specifically for Google, it might not do so well in Yahoo and MSN and I could loose a large amount of that 20%. It should cost no more for you to optimise your site properly and that 20% could contain the bigger spenders.

Another reason is, at the beginning of last month my site was virtually dropped by google, yes the number of pages indexed in google reduced drastically. The result was that my traffic dropped by 75%. If I had not thought about the other search engines when designing the site I could have lost 95% of traffic and therefor 95% of my income.
Google recommend design your site for the end user and not for the search engines, this does make sense as you want it to be an enjoyable experience for your visitors but it can also lead to problems. If you start introducing javascript navigation, or Ajax routines to update your site dynamically the search engine robots will not be able to read/understand your site and it could end up dropping down the search engine results pages (SERPs) so ensure you make it look good to the end user but at the same time readable and understandable for the robots.

Just a quick post today.

When developing a site it is tempting to fill the page title and meta tags with keywords. It makes sense to to a point. However you must be carefull, over doing it can be classed as spamming and the Search engines frown upon it.

I always check a new site with the Widexl - Meta Tag Analyzer v1.9 , it analyzes your page and presents you with a report giving your title and meta tags a score etc. I am not affiliated with the site but find it a great tool to use. Give it a go.