Optimizing for the search engines

I was just wondering how many of you design a website and make sure its optimized for all the search engines. Make sure you vote above. Feel free to reply and let us know what you do if you want.

yes, depending on the nature of the project/content and of course the
client's knowledge of the internet. If they really want to gain traffic for
SE's, then I do. If they plan to do their biz by direct advertising, then
not so much.

Yes, I always optimize for SEs. Well, mainly for Google because that's the SE my target audience mostly uses, but I've noticed I do pretty well on other SEs too.

But I still make my pages primarily for my *visitors*. When I start writing the page, I don't give one little piece of a thought to SEs, only to the visitors. After I've made the page, I make sure there are my most important keywords:

1) In the <title> tag and description meta tag. I also have some keywords in the keywords meta tag, although most SEs don't pay attention to them anymore.

2) In the copy. The more keywords in the copy, the merrier. But I carefully avoid overdoing it - I'm only optimizing, *not* spamming!

3) In <h>, <strong> (or <b>) and <em> (or <i>) tags. I'm not 100% sure, but i've heard some SEs putting more weight on keywords that are bold, italics, or in a title (enclosed in <h> tags). But, again, I avoid overdoing it - if there's no good reason to emphasize a word, I won't!

4) In the anchor text of links pointing to that certain page. At least Google ranks a page higher for phrase "some weird keywords" if the links pointing to that page contain words "some strange keywords" in the anchor text.

And, of course, I validate my pages before uploading them - this way I make sure there aren't any errors in the code that prevent the spiders from crawling my site properly.

Sounds to me like you have a good method there. My main method is to build a ton of content and usually the search engines and other people love it The only other thing you need to worry about if you are optimizing to get traffic from Google is PageRank.

If you want traffic, you need to optimize.

Pretty much. I also sometimes adapt descriptions/text based on the most popular search keywords (i.e. use a thesaurus), and this makes a big difference sometimes based on whether you want to market to an audience in the UK, states, or Australia...

I agree that the content should be written for the reader first, then optimized for the search engines.

I wrote a site in the wrong order once (for SE's first) , and when I checked my logs I saw that most people were staying on the site for less than 15 seconds.

After re-writting the just the headlines, my visitors stayed an avg 45 seconds. I was guilty of putting too many keywords into the Headline making it almost unreadable.

Not necessarily. Some of the most highly trafficked sites on the Internet are not optimized.

such as? do you have any examples?

and besides, I think ATNO was just saying for best results, and not to
mention quicker results.

Google, Yahoo, Monster, CNN, etc - these sites don't need to optimize their pages for search engines because they are well know sites.

iPowerWeb, ServerBeach, etc - these sites don't optimize for search engines because they run highly profitable affiliate programs.

I spoke with the CEO of a large home improvement network a while back, and I asked why he stopped his SEO activities. He said "SEO is a gamble". Top rankings may or may not produce large amounts of traffic, but with SEO the ranking is not guaranteed.

I find that there is much more effective ways of producing targeted traffic which converts.

Here's a two-part article on the failure of SEO:
http://www.internet-marketing-research. ... keting.php

want to know a good way to optimize for SE's? List your site in your sig, and post on OZZU OZZU has really grown to be something special, we should all thank BigWeb along with the moderators for making this such a special place....

Hooray for signitures!

I do go out of my way to optimize for SE's, but definately not at the cost of readability. Just little things like using <H> tags and <B> tags, as well as listing the title tags in a decent order (like title of page - title of site), but thats about it..