Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
How you design your website is one of the most important factors in getting high search engine ranking.
Let's go over some basics.
The <title></title> tag goes inside of the <Head> element. Whatever you put inside of the title tag is what will show up on title bar on most browsers as well as the tabs. For example, Furtopia forums index title is, "Furtopia Forums! - Index." Which is what shows up right next to the favicon in the tabs.
When you do a google search, the title is also the thing listed at the top of each result in the biggest font. It's what you click.
Your title is the single most important element for SEO. It's one of the areas that bots will go to look for defining keywords for your website.
Keywords:
There are several areas in a website where it's very important to have good keywords. Title is an example of such a place. You want to make sure that your keywords are broad enough that your website can be found by someone looking for your kind of site, but NOT so broad that you're competing with millions of other websites to hit the top.
For example, if i was selling chocolate in Texas, and had a website for my store, i would include my city and zip code in the title. Why? Because if you type, "Chocolate," into google you're going to have millions and millions of websites that show up before yours, and you will never be able to fight your way to the top over See's candies and Hershey. But if you have something like your zipcode or your city listed, then you've become a lot more specific. People looking for local Chocolate companies will find you.
Places where what you type is important:
Title, H1, H2, H3... honestly everywhere affects it to some extent. It's just these are more important than <p>...
Image file names: Instead of labeling the picture of the cat you drew on your website, "Catpic_39e73n.gif," Try stuffing in extra keywords like, "Nameofyourwebsite_Furry_Anthro_cat.gif,"
All of these things stack up, but it's VERY IMPORTANT TO NOTE, that you want to make sure not to repeat the same words over and over again. If you create an H1 tag and fill it with, "Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry Furry," and then hide it in your website by setting it's fixed position a couple thousand pixels off screen...
....YOU WILL BE BLACKLISTED. Your website will either loose a LOT of ranking very quickly, or will be entirely removed from google for a few months as a penalty. This is called Blackhat SEO, DO. NOT. WANT!
Meta Tags:
Metatags are slowly loosing their validity in google, but i don't know much about other search engines like bing or altavista.
The <meta name="description" content="text"> tag still has a large impact. After the title in a Google search result, you will see a description of the website. This is the meta description tag. If you don't have this, it will just find the first text on the website to put here... but it's really a shame to let this go to waste because it has, as I said already, a large impact on SEO. It's also important that you fill this tag with no more than 160 characters (which is Google’s limit)
The <meta name="keywords" content="words"> tag is now completely unused by Google. Other search engines may use it, but I wouldn't spend too much time on it.
Other things also affect your ranking:
How long your website has been up and on the same server.
How often your content is updated. (this is why blogs and forums get very good ranking)
How many other websites link to your domain.
Whether you have clean URLs.
(that is to say, if your URL looks like:
Forum.website.com/thread-21-page-2.html Search engines like that a lot better than:
Forum.website.com/GQERIQ4932223liubfweil2&iwn=21 )
How many different pages are on your website with a variety of content. The more of both the better. (again, why forums and blogs get amazing ranking)
Does this help? ^.^?