In reply to Willi Crater:
> Search engines aren't really bothered about your site 'being laid out properly'.
Yes they are. See page 8 of the SEO Guide (as elsewhere rightly points out). Also the following page is useful:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329
> This seems a bit meaningless to me. Google, bing, duckduckgo, etc. have no idea how long you have 'bought' your domain for. Even if they did it wouldn't feature on the algorithms they use.
Of course they do, it's public information (eg whois data). None of the search engines actually detail their algorithms
as it'd make gaming them too easy. But they do weight information that's been around for a while (and linked to a lot) higher. So there's no harm in doing this. But it's probably a very minor part of the picture. Honestly, it's all about content.
> How would they not be? Don't think you can use (for e.g.) base64 encoding for URLs.
Again read page 8 of the Google SEO Guidelines. I mean that this URL:
www.example.com/climbing/how-to-belay.html
Is better than:
www.example.com/p.php?id=12345
> Relies on you persuading other 'good sites' to backlink to yours. Not always easy in my experience.
I never said it was easy. I just said it was important. Indeed, generally, unless you have very deep pockets, I simply wouldn't bother trying to get backlinks. Just post really good content on a regular basis on your site and on all major social media sites and the links will eventually come.
SEO that's important that you have control over:
- Content, lots of it, that's good, posted often and linked in all the social media
SEO that's important but is largely out of your control:
- Backlinks
SEO that's not so important, but easy to do (so well worth doing):
- Site structure/design
- Domain structure / age
- Adding your site on to Google/Bing/Yahoo webmaster tools