Difference between revisions of "Thoughts On SEO"

A number of SEO/SEM related questions are generally floating around so I created this page so that we can inventory the questions, accumulate answers if we know them and identify the ones we should seek outside help for.

• Should we be submitting anything to the major Search Engines?

• Google Webmaster Center can tell you tons about your web site, nothing else can be submitted to a search engine besides a sitemap; but, I've never had to deal with a sitemap for this many pages. Maybe make a sitemap with the main pages in it?--Simon | talk

• Should page names be CamelCased?

• CamelCased or not should not affect the Google search rankings.--Simon | talk

• How does the Google indexing work, i.e. why does the number of pages run up for a while, then run down

• The Google Bot comes to your site (most likely daily or more than daily) it has a few records of your domain, and does a cache probably each time because aboutus is so big. Sometimes it runs into errors, there are more or less people linking to you everyday. Also Google does not links to and from, so because when most people link to AboutUs they link to their page and not the Homepage Google goes there and sees a link back to them and think your trying to rid the system and can count you down for that. The Google "algorithm" is quite complex, and nobody can possibly say on why today your site is up or down, I can only give you general terms. --Simon | talk

• ...

Thoughts from Nathan:

• Search engines such as Google will spider us regardless. We're not in directories (ie. Yahoo or dmoz) so I'd say let's add listings there.
• It's purely a question of user preference and style and the answer is subjective, depending on who you ask. I think it doesn't matter. Ask someone else and you may get a different answer.
• That's what I'd like to know; for example, my website url in Google gets lots of results (not many originally from the website) and my PageRank is (sadly) 4.