Part II

Building Search Engine–Friendly Sites

In this part . . .

Time for the details. In this part, you discover strategies that help your site rank well in search engines — and circumstances that almost guarantee that your site won’t do well in search engines. Understand the information in this part, and you’re way ahead of most Web site owners, designers, and developers.

You begin by learning about keywords, the very foundation of a search-engine campaign. If you don’t understand your keywords, you’re wasting your time.

You also discover what search engines like to find in your Web pages that are likely to help your site rank well — simplicity, text content with the right keywords, keywords in heading tags and bold text, and so on. You also discover what type of content has the opposite effect, making search engines stumble when they reach your site or even leave the site without reading any pages. From frames to dynamically generated pages to session IDs, these characteristics can be the kiss of death if you’re not careful.

I also let you in on a few secrets that search engines hate, techniques that people often use to “trick” the search engines but that can also be dangerous. Many folks in the search engine optimization business shy away from using these techniques for fear of having their pages penalized or entire sites banned from the search engines.

This part shows you how to quickly build the content on your site (content is king as far as the search engines are concerned) and discusses how to make your site appear in local searches.