Reading up on SEO

MGDesigns

I've been reading alot on SEO lately and just wanted to check that I'm actually taking stuff in so you've all been elected as my sound off board, I'm in need of feedback

Adding search to web site
Keeping keywords to 20 and under and not repeating the same word even if it's used in a phrase
Adding a robots.txt file to root
Using descriptive filenames and page titles...

How am I doing on working this stuff out? :baby:

Nuvo

You're getting there.
Adding searching to a site isn't really a biggie, but it can be a good thing anyway.

Keywords shouldn't be repeated and shouldn't be too long.
Boosting ratings by misusing keywords is what got BMW kicked out of Google's search listings (HAH!).

The whole robots.txt thing isn't there to get better ratings, but to keep you safe from spiders (crawlers \ robots \ whatever).
Basically, it gives you somewhere to tell spiders how to read and index your site.
If you don't want a spider to run over your site, you can tell it to go away while letting others go ahead, or you can close off sections of your site so that they don't get indexed (such as admin only area's).

Being descriptive is a good idea as it means that you're more likely to turn up in search results.
Lets say you have a file called 3w9v34oof.png and a file called my_party_1_of_10.png.
Now, the file with a meaningful name is more likely to be shown by an engine simply because the user is more likely to type in one of the words in it's name than some random and meaningless alphanumeric string.
If you look at Google, it uses page titles for the titles of it's listings, so a good title is more likely to show up than one that has little or no meaning.

One other thing is that generally, search engines don't often like query strings in URL's, so it's better to use clean URL's where possible.
If you're using a framework like Rails, Django or Symphony, this might be done using a simpler internal routing system like rails routes, but if not, you can do it with Apache config files.
It's less of a pain for someone to find site.com/apps/my_script/log than it is to find site.com/apps.php?app=my_script&act=log and search engines will like this more too.
With Apache's mod_rewrite, you do have to be careful as it can be a bit iffy with relative paths (it looks for files using the rewrote URL path rather than the real one, but it's easy to get around).

MGDesigns

Thank you Nuvo, extremely helpful

Amongst my travels last night I came across:-
http://www.webconfs.com/

It helped me with htaccess redirecting but there is loads more on there so tonnes of reading to do :cool:

xPureNLx

Hmm, threads as these are very helpfull. Many thanks you both

WatchOut

Wow thanks a lot really really helpful.

I wouldn't know this without your help, thanks a lot guys!

I love webmasterpost.

websitesbuilt

SEO has more bad information out there than anything else I have ever seen. Dont mean in this thread, but as of yet, havent seen one source that I felt was correct straight through. Sadly it seems a lot of trail and error and experience.