Read through the Frequently Asked Questions about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for your webjam.
SEO is useful mainly to people who have upgraded to Premium or use Webjam's Branded Services & who have domain mapped their webjam.

I want to make my webjam more visible on Search Engines – what can I do?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a buzzword these days as everyone wants to have their pages ranked well in search engines. While discussing all of the intricacies of SEO would be too much for these FAQs, Webjam does provide tools to improve the SEO friendliness of your webjam. While these tips don’t guarantee an increased ranking, it will get you started in the right direction. Most of the changes to be made are within the ‘settings’ tab on your webjam.

Make sure your webjam pages are readable by the search engines
Under the 'settings' tab, ensure the pages you want displayed in search results are public.  If a page is set to "Members of this webjam" (community only) or "Private", then they can’t be seen by search engines.

Make use of a small number of keywords
Decide on a small number of keywords that, if entered into a search engine, should find your page. Make sure that the word is used relatively often in the normal content of your page and site. Don’t just copy the word over & over as this will count against you, instead use the word in normal text. This can be very difficult to get right – we recommend that you read SEOmoz.org Beginner’s Guide to SEO to learn more.

• Use the same keyword in the title of your webjam. You can change the title under the 'settings' tab. Note that for sub-pages of the site, the title is automatically taken from the title of the webjam plus the page name.  For example, if the webjam title is 'Racing' and the page name is 'Formula1', then the title of the Formula1 page would be 'Racing Formula1'.
• Note that Webjam will be improving this area to give users the ability to change the title on each page and to use a short keyword in the navigation bar.

• While not directly used for the ranking of the page, the description will be used in the search results so it’s important to have a description that will make people want to click through to your site.

• General consensus is that only the meta keywords tag is used for ranking of an SEO page, if at all. You can add your keywords to the webjam tags field under the 'settings' tab and they will be automatically added to the meta-keywords for the page.

• Within your HTML modules, think about including your keywords in H1 and H2 tags and well as adding formatting to make the keywords stand out a bit more.
• Note that the module headers used by Webjam are automatically H1 tags.

• If you site is new or doesn’t have a lot of links to it, you might want to add your site to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/
• To check if your site has been added to Google, check out your URL at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus
• You can add your page to Yahoo at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/free/request

• The biggest factor for SEO is to ensure that many reputable sites link back to your site. Use the badges under the promote tab to easily get links.
• Take part in web forums that match the topic of your webjam and insert the URL of your webjam.
• Insert your webjam URL in your signature in bulletin boards and emails that might get posted.
• Add your webjam URL as your homepage address for your online profiles.
• Many internet sites will link to sites with good, relevant content.

Who gets the SEO benefits - Webjam or my site?
If you have upgraded your site to Premium and domain-mapped your site, then you won't lose any of the SEO benefits from your previous domain. Search engines, like Google, use the domain portion of the URL (e.g., the 'www.xyz.com' part of 'http://www.xyz.com/home') to determine who the page belongs to.  So, if the site is domain-mapped, you get all of the SEO benefits and all of the power of the Webjam platform.

I don't want my webjam visible on Search Engines – what can I do?
The easiest way to make your webjam not visible to search engines is to make the webjam community-only or private.  This will prevent the search engine from detecting your page and listing it.

Article: SEO glossary – demystifying the language of the geeks, by Judith Lewis, search director & journalist working in SEO and SEM Search  Engine Optimising and Marketing

Google: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), also contains a PDF Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

SEOmoz.org: Beginner’s Guide to SEO

www.searchengineoptimising.com: A Guide to Search Engine Optimisation, SEO articles and tips

High Rankings: SEO articles

The SEO Book blog