Do you optimise your sites? (part guide, part open forum)
 

If you own a website, do you optomise it for search engines? if so did you pay for it or did you work things out for yourself and go from there?
Personally I have never run an ad based site or a site based on hits from random searchers, until now. I am currently coding a project due for release in the summer they key to optimisation

Find a unique, rememberal URL like "iknow", "didyouknow", "canyou". Basically anything that has subdomain possibilites for creating a network of thinks like
cars.iknow.com for car reviews
news.iknow.com for news from around the world

Think of a project and figure out how to do it.


Do you even have meta tags in your site? have you submitted to the biggest search engines? (google and yahoo are by far the leaders in search hits).

I've run some test for LinuxServerTalk and cant see the result for the forums, so soulwatcher get this bad boy submitted to google, grab an adsense banner and start making yourself some (albeit small) revenue on the site.

Have you joined a toplist?
Toplists, with enough sites on them can be a great source of site hits, especially if your users coming from X search engine, vote for you and users from topsites click on your search engine adverts. Its a happy little cycle

Optimise vbulletin for search engines Google/yahoo with this hack:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showt...&highlight=SEO
and
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showt...&highlight=SEO
Ok I'll stop blabbing :p

I don't optomise my sites until they're completely done

Durinthiam, thanks for the advice and ideas. Believe it or not this website is only a little over 2 weeks old. I had the domain for over 6 months and I had to sit on it until I had the money to develop it. The server sat at my house for a good 3 months. I had other oblations and I just didn't have the money to co-locate the server.

Now that I have my income taxes I am working on developing the website and I have moved the server to the data center. I haven't submitted the website to google yet because I am going to be buying vbSEO. I do not want to get a bunch of links in google only to have vbSEO break them.

Future plans for this website are vbSEO, get it listed in every topsite directory that I can find, and running a aggressive google adword campaign. Right now I am still working on the server, yesterday I just switched from postfix to sendmail. And their are a few other minor tweaks that I am working on. Mostly I need allot of users on the website so I can optimize the server for the website. But I have a feeling that that is going to happen latter down the road. I have it optimized now but there is no way for me to test it unless we get slash dotted.

I try to optimize them a bit. I am not that good with SEO, but I do try my best. I have some mod rewrites in some sites and try to optimize the keywords too. Have to confess this is the thing I know less, I am good with design and content, but SEO for me is something still new and unreachable ;)

I review my sites periodically and I make various changes. However, when I optimize widely available software like phpBB, I tend to use SEO mods and tweaks that are already available rather than trying to come up with my own methods.