Search Engine Optimisation - Google Webmaster Guidelines |

Search Engine Optimisation is the art of formatting your website to meet the guidelines of the search engines to allow them to display your web pages in their search engines. If the search engines do not like the format of your website it is not going to rank for its search terms or keywords and its not going to get visited by any traffic. If you do not get visitors to your site you are not going to make any money.

Now in my series on how I create a niche website to earn me commissions I show you how to set out a wordpress blog and wordpress theme to maximise your exposure to the search engines. When I wrote this series of posts I thought I had covered most things. However I am now part way through a course by Brian G Johnson a well respected Internet Markets who is a search engine optimisation fanatic. Brian is teaching me I need to apply the Google Webmaster Guidelines in much greater detail to maximise my chances of doing well in Google. Now the Google Guidelines are quite clear but what opened my eyes to my mistakes was how Brian interprets them for his websites. He is a webmaster with several hundred sites earning over $500,000 a year which is evidence enough for me that he is getting it right.

Now I have included Brian's video below and you ought to watch it. He covers this part if the guidelines in detail

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. (WordPress does this quite well)
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages. (WordPress has a great plugin for this)
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number. (too many links will look like spam)
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. (here the key is to make it UNIQUE to your site)
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. (don't use jargon unless your readers will search for such terms)
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text. (take the time to name each image with your keywords)
Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate. (make sure they relate to your content)
Check for broken links and correct HTML.(many people do not even go back to check what they have just published on the web)
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. (set up wordpress correctly in the settings - do not use the default setting!)
Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.