Search Engine Optimization for your philosophy websites

Optimizing your site for search engines is basically a way of getting free targetted traffic. You want surfers to be able to enter relevent search terms (keywords) into their favourite search engine and have your site listed on the first page. To do this you'll need to have each page optimized for particular keywords.

Example

Suppose your site is an existentialist study guide containing 5 pages - your homepage and pages on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Camus.

For the homepage you want to think about the type of person who would want to visit your site. You need to attact visitors who are genuinely after your content, so pick keywords that accurately reflect your site. With this example your keyword for the homepage would be something like "existentialist study guide".

On your Kierkegaard page your keyword will be "kierkegaard study guide", on the Sartre page your keyword be "sartre study guide" and so on. The idea is that all your pages will be listed in the search engines on the relevant pages. So hopefully, when people search for "merleau-ponty study guide" your Merleau-Ponty page will get a nice position the search-engines.

The more pages your site has the more likely it is that you will get visitors onto your site.

Basic SEO strategy for your philosophy site

Each page you create for your philosophy site should be optimized for a different keyword. How do you go about this? Firstly, the filename of the page should be a keyword, i.e. sartre.htm. The <title> must include the keyword as must your <h1> (and <h2> if you have one) tags. The text of the page needs to include your keyword and the links need to have your keyword too. If you have included images on the page you need to put your keyword in the alt text.

The tag for your image is:

To include alt text you need to modify the tag thus:

Now when a visitor hovers his mouse cursor over the image the words "whatever you want" will appear in a box over the image.

You could also put all the images you use for that page in a folder called sartre.