What are the key things to do to get good search engine placement?

[budbiss]

What are the most important things I need to do to get a good placement on search engines?

[jatar_k]

You could look through this
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]

A fair amount of the steps are relevant to all engines.

[budbiss]

Thanks, that is very informative. I have a few questions though...

HERE IS A LITTLE BACKGROUND FIRST:
The site I do sells business [snip] to other businesses who either maintain or install office, hotel, etc systems or 'endusers' (people who typically work in a smaller office environment who want to try to maintain there current [snip] themselfs when possible to save cash).

QUESTIONS:
1) in reference to...
"A) Prep work and begin building content. Long before the domain name is settled on, start putting together notes to build at least a 100 page site. That's just for openers. That's 100 pages of real content, as opposed to link pages, resource pages, about/copyright/tos...etc eg: fluff pages."

What can I write 100 pages about with my type of site?

2)in reference to...
"C) Site Design:..." "...Go external with scripting languages if you must have them - there is little reason to have them that I can see..."

We use OSCommerce, a php/mySQL store solution, will this hurt us when being spidered?

3)in reference to...
"E) Content:
Build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words..."

Again, does this really make any sense when it comes to the type of site I have?

[edited by: pageoneresults at 2:55 pm (utc) on Feb. 7, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]

[RonHollingsworth]

You are going to have to come up with that on your own. I'm sure that you know your business better than anyone on the boards. Whatever the industry you are in, become the authority on it. Know it, eat it, sleep it and then write about it. Come up with what your customer/visitors want and then give it to them by writing articles on it. If you don't know what that is, then just ask them.

Submitting an article a day is great, however can be a reach if your day is filled. Whatever you do just start writing articles and adding them to your site. At least 2 a week or more if you can. Get content on your site.

[fasteddie uk2001]

As far as I can remember the latest versions of OSCommerce have short URL rewriting as an admin option, make sure you turn this on to enable search engine friendly pages.

f

[budbiss]

Is 'use Search-Engine Safe URLs' the same thing? We were talking about turning this on, I'm not exactly sure what it does, but it does say that it is still in developement. I read that some people have turned this on and have had no problems, yet others say it causes problems.

[willybfriendly]

What can I write 100 pages about with my type of site?

How long can you talk about your business and your products? Whatever it is that you talk about is the beginning of your content.

What questions do people ask?

Don't do a FAQ page - instead do a page themed around each question they might ask.

If the feature set is rich enough, do a page describing each feature and its benefits.

I am sure that you know enough to write a hundred 250 word blurbs about your products. You just have writer's block.

WBF

[fasteddie uk2001]

Yep the search-engine friendly urls is what I was referring to. I've used it on various sites with no problems. Give it a go, if you run into probs, you can always change it back.

f