Building a Genealogy Friendly Website

Content:

Good original genealogy research is always in demand. This is the single most important item that will set your website apart from the rest of the websites that are already out there on the web. We already have too many websites that are nothing more than a rehashed version of someone else's hard work, or a "link farm". A link farm is a website that consists primarily of links to other websites with no real original content of their own. What we need is some fresh, quality origional genealogy content and to be able to bring some of the older genealogy websites that have origional content up in the search engine ranking. This will help drive back some of the websites of lesser value and therefore we will be able to find the quality data we are all searching for.

Keywords:

Keywords should about 24 of the key words that most accurately describes your website. Try to use the words that people would most likely use to find your website.

Links:

Links are a very important aspect of any website. It is very hard to get a good search engine ranking without them, but they need to be relevant to your website. A link is a reflection of who you are and what you represent, choose them wisely. What is a good link? First of all a good link will point to the original source of work that will support or compliment your original work. Any link that links to a product you are trying to sell or promote is a good link. Links to websites of your friends and people you do business with are always good. Lastly, links that point to original sources of information the researcher can use to enhance their research, Records Archives, Libraries, war sites etc... The links that you want to avoid is a link to any website that appears to be nothing more than a link farm. These links can actually hurt you in your search engine rankings. You should avoid using more than 100 externial links to a page.

HTML:

Use appropriate title tag with a title that well describes your website.
Use Meta tags - The three meta tage you need to be most concerned with are:
- 1. META name="robots" content=INDEX,FOLLOW"
- 2. META name="description" content="your description"
- 3. META name="keywords" content="your keywords seperated by a comma and a single space"
Use alt tags in your images
Use H1 and H2 tags
Use bold tags to emphasize your keywords and surnames on the page.