[red rocket]

As all of my previous sites were targeted at an extremely narrow audience, I'd never given any thought to search engine optimisation, but now that I'm actually interested in a site of mine showing up on Google, I'm at a bit of a loss because the techniques I'd assumed would work best seem to frowned upon / useless nowadays.

Thing is, I've got a very basic front page consisting of a title image and three link buttons. The first button leads to an image gallery, the second to a TOA file, and the third to a members-only discussion forum.

What I would have done, had I not read today about how ill-advised it would be, is stuff the meta tag in the front page full of very specific keywords that the type of people who I'd like to join the forum would search for.

Apparently though, Google doesn't even scan keyword descriptions any more.

I don't intend to have any textual content on the front page.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[sambeau]

Don't try to trick Google. It might work for a while, but not in the long run.
Best thing to do is to use real content. Put titles on the images that mean something. On the pages you want to be found, use real text and title with your keywords in them. By all means put relevant keywords in your meta tags (both site and page) and while Google may not use meta tags, other search engines do.
The best way to get Google to notice your pages is to get some good quality incoming links.
Remember Google goes for pages rather than sites, Google changes its algorithm on a regular basis, Google often blacklists sites and drops loads of spammers on every update.

Probably not what you want to hear - but trust me, I've been bitten badly by trying to play Google.

[Chuckit]

In short:

• Descriptive page titles
• Put good alt tags on all your images
• Consider using normal text with CSS image replacement for image-based headers and indices
• Most importantly, try to get good links to your site — a lot of Google's "secret sauce" lies in how it interprets link data

I'm not an SEO expert,

[Brass]

Google is trying to make their search results relevant, based on actual text content. If your front page has no real text content, it will never show up on Google. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. People don't want Google pointing them to a page with no real content, they want Google to point them directly to the page that is going to give them the answers they are looking for.

If you want them to find your front page, then you are going to have to stuff you front page full of relevant information.

The other key to being ranked hightly on Google, is to have other hightly ranked sites link to your site, using useful keywords in their links. Google actually places more ranking empasis on this than it does on your actual content. Again, this makes sense if you think about it. Links to your site are likely to contain a few important keywords only, which are very relevant to the site's content.

This information is all available from Google, on their tips for getting your page ranked highly.