Annie Oakley's White Hat Search Engine Optimization - White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is what the good guys do.  Certain search engine optimization techniques exist which are acceptable to the search engines.  You can do a lot toward getting the pages of a website found more readily simply by using these SEO techniques.  The one area in which I feel it's necessary to step a little off the straight and narrow in optimization is in external links.  Getting links pointing to your website is such a vital aspect of the current ranking criteria used by the search engines that it's important to make sure you actively seek out links from well-respected sites.  This is where a great deal of the creativity, intelligence and work of a search engine optimizer comes into play.  Unless a website is in an incredibly niche' market it must have many links in order to be found and rank well in the natural search results.

Yahoo, Google and MSN all offer help to web designers and optimizers in making their web pages 'friendly' to that search engine.

Here are some of the Yahoo guidelines:

*  Good, clear web design.
*  Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine compatibility a secondary consideration
*  Original content, of value to the visitor
*  Links to the web page intended to help people find interesting, related content
*  Metadata including Title and Description Tags

More of what Yahoo is looking for and not looking for in Web Pages can be found here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html
 

Google guidelines include:

*  Each page of the site must be reachable from at least one text link (normal html hyperlinks)
*  Offer a sitemap to your visitors with pages and links clearly defined
*  Use plain text to display important content, names and links
*  Write pages filled with quality, useful, information-rich content
*  Think of the words people would use to search for your site and includes those within the content of your pages.
*  Don't have more than 100 links on a given page
*  Make sure your Metadata accurately describes what is on that page
*  Check for and fix any broken hyperlinks

More of Google's likes and dislikes can be found here: 
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
 

MSN has their guidelines for successful indexing:

*  Fill your webpages with valuable content in which your visitors are likely to be interested
*  In the visible text of your site includes the words people would use to search for a site such as yours
*  Limit the size of each web page and include a single subject per page
*  Make sure each page can be found by at least one static text hyperlink
*  Don't put important text that you want indexed into images
*  Create and add to your website a sitemap that will help the MSNbot to find all the pages of your site
*  Each page should be no more than one to three clicks away from the home (index) page

More from MSN: 
http://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-us&project=wl_webmasters

By taking a look at the brief summations of webmaster guidelines from the three major search engines you can see a consistency in what they are looking for in a website.  So, the first step of all optimization efforts should be ensuring your sites meet these standards.

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