Google SEO research

Google SEO research

Recently I have started researching SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in 
particular Google SEO.  The first thing I did was to setup an account on Google 
Webmaster Tools:

   Google Webmaster Central
   What is a Google webmaster tools account?
   Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Taking a quote from Google Webmaster Tools help pages it "provides information 
about your added sites, Sitemaps, their latest updates, and also allows you to 
add new Sitemaps for crawling by Google."  The concept of these tools is pretty 
good -- they give you an overview of what Google bot knows about your site ... 
but it's very frustrating having to wait for updates in the tools after you've 
made optimizations to meta tags, titles, etc..  I know that the bot had already 
visited my pages days if not weeks ago but the tools do not reflect the 
changes.  I realize that it takes time to do proper analysis-paralysis of the 
pages and links to them and from them but it just makes it very difficult to 
make proper adjustments to your strategy.

Google Webmaster Tools alone are not enough to properly adjust your SEO 
strategy, probably the most useful tool you have are the server logs, dig 
through them daily if not hourly and examine REFERER use the same searches that 
the people that came to your site used and see where you are placed on the 
search results -- that is the immediate feedback.

So far I've learned couple of things the hard way ... The first and probably 
the most important thing is to include meaningful, unique titles on all of your 
pages to better relate your content description:

   <title>Content Desc</title>

For instance if you had a page titled "a_conc_progs.sql script" it's pretty 
much a waste of space on your website as the chances of it being found through 
a search engine are slim to none.  You would probably want to name it "ORACLE 
APPS Concurrent Program lookup sqlplus script".

Filenames do apparently matter too, with exception of the homepage which is 
obviously always named index.suffix ... so if you had a page named 
a_conc_progs.html you might want to expand it to:

   ORACLE_APPS_Concurrent_Program_lookup_sqlplus_script.html

File naming also applies to the domain name itself.  I bet that if you were in 
the business of doing ORACLE APPS Implementations you would do much better with 
the following domain:

   www.oracle-apps-consulting.com

than the following domain name:

   www.rapid-consulting.com

Then I realized that if you managed to put this meta tag in all of your pages:

   <META NAME="description" CONTENT="DBAToolZ Portal">

you better make sure that the CONTENT= portion of it change from page to page.  
How many of you copied the same .html page to create a website never paying 
attention to this "little" meta tag?  I sure did back in 1998 and I paid the 
price now by being put in the Supplemental index on Google.  Either make sure 
it's unique of just drop it all together.

NOTE:
   I have to say that there are number of my pages that show up in the 
   top 3 results (above forums.oracle.com) even though they are
   sitting in Google's Supplemental index.

   But I also notice that pages in the Supplemental index are not visited
   by the crawler as often as the pages placed in the main index.

After launching DBAToolZ Forums I realized that most of the content here would 
never be ranked as high as if it were placed in the static .HTML pages on my 
site ... why?  Because all of the pages here are created via a query so the 
path to a page would always contain a ? mark or & ...  So I went off to look 
for a solution to this problem and I came up with mod_rewrite which allows you 
to re-write a page like this:

   "http://yoursite.com/topics/abc.html"

to:

   "http://yoursite.com/proc?topic=abc"

pretty cool no?  mod_rewrite can do all this silently while keeping the URL in 
the user's browser at:

   "http://yoursite.com/topics/abc.html"

here's a sample code to accomplish this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/topics/.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^/topics/(.*)\.html$ /proc?topic=$1 [PT]

Finally it's all about the content.  You can optimize all you want but if your 
content sucks or none existent you will not benefit in the long run.  Design 
your site for your users first then look into SEO.  SEO will make your site 
search engine friendly and will drive more users to your content ... but if 
there is no content to begin with these users will come and go and never come 
back again. Here, read this post by mattcutts.com:

   SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love