Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Getting Started

Even if you are new to web development you have probably heard about search engine optimization--SEO for short. Generally speaking, SEO is more important to commercial websites than it is to personal websites but it's just plain cool to see your website appear in the top 10 results of a search regardless of what type of website you create. In this article we will explore the basic concepts of how search engine optimization works.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Simply put, search engine optimization is the practice or organizing your website's content and HTML to improve each page's organic rank (organic rank means basically any unpaid result). To that end there are many different factors that go into organizing content and HTML to be more search engine friendly. The most common factors that you should consider when optimizing are the content of the page, the page title, the meta description and the meta keywords. Obviously there are more than just 4 factors to successful search engine optimization but these elements form the basic core.

How do Search Engines Work?

There are two different types of search engines, crawler- based and human-based. And yes, it's just like a automobile transmission--automatic and manual. The crawler-based engines use automated systems that constantly "crawl" the web and catalog everything they find. The human-based engines are exactly the opposite. They require a human to read, review and rank websites then enter that information into a database.

There is also one other "mutant" form of search engine that is usually referred to as a Hybrid engine. Hybrid engines use crawlers to automatically compile the basic data from websites but then use the human input to influence rankings. For example, two different websites that are virtually identical in content may end up with very different raking results if one website has been favorably reviewed by someone and the other has either not been reviewed or received a bad review.

Now that you know how the search engines compile their data I'm sure you would like to know exactly how they determine their ranks. Well, that is the big money question. All search engines have either developed their own unique algorithms or use a variation of a base search engine to compile ranks which means no two search engines are exactly alike. In fact, those algorithms are such closely guarded secrets that we will likely never know exactly how data is compiled and organized by any of the major search engines.

What's Important to Search Engines?

As I stated earlier there are many different factors that search engines weigh when compiling rankings. However, there is a set core of elements:

Page Title

The page title is one of the most important elements of search engine optimization as it provides the search engines with the most relevant keywords for the page. There are several good practices and bad practices when coming up with page titles. Do make your titles relevant and use as many of your most important keywords as possible. Don't be overly repetitive or long winded. Being too repetitive can be considered a "cheat" by search engines and result in a lower rank. Being too long winded in your title can also yield the same result or the search engines may simply concatenate your title and ignore everything after a certain number of characters.

A good title should look something like this:

A bad title would look something like this:

Page Content

This one is a little tougher to optimize. Your focus should be on two fronts. First, try to put as many of your primary keywords at the top of your content as possible. Obviously you should not just list your keywords at the top of your content. It still has to make sense to the reader. Second, repeat as many keywords or keyword phrases throughout the text as makes sense. Again, repetition for the sake of repetition is never a good idea.

There are other techniques that you can use to get the search engine's attention on your keywords such as the use of

tags but we don't have space to go into those techniques in this article. However, I promise we will cover some of those techniques in a future article.

Meta Description

This is simply a short summary of the content that is on your page. In most cases 2 to 3 sentences will suffice. When you write your description try to use as many of you primary keywords as makes sense. Again, don't go crazy on the repetition or you may just end up lowering your rank instead of raising it. An example of a good description would be:

Meta Keywords

This is precisely what you would expect, a list of keywords and keyword phrases. There are just a few simple things to keep in mind when putting your keywords together:

1. Do both keywords and keyword phrases
2. Prioritize your keywords from most important to least important (in case a search engine caps the number of keywords it will catalog)
3. DO NOT repeat keywords in the list unless they appear solo and within a phrase - e.g. "search, search engine" is fine but "search, engine, search, engine" is not.
4. Separate keywords and phrases with a comma
5. Don't worry about putting common misspelling in your keyword list. Most search engines will assist the chronic bad speller search with correct spelling.

An example of a good keyword tag would be something like:

What is Meta Data?

Meta data pretty much encompasses all meta tags such as description and keywords mentioned above. Of course, there are many more that you can use such as author and copyright as well as http-equiv settings which define things like your content type and language settings. Meta tags were actually designed with complete flexibility in mind which means you could make up your own meta data if you are so inclined. Keep in mind though, your custom meta data will be pretty much ignored by everything and everyone but you.

Putting It All Together

Now that you know about all the basic pieces how do you go about putting them all together for each of your web pages? There are many different schools of thought on this but I prefer to use my own checklist:

1. Read the content and compile a list of keywords
2. Prioritize the keyword list from most important to least important
3. Write the title using as many primary keywords as possible
4. Write the description using as many primary keywords as possible
5. Review the content and see if there needs to be any rewrite to bring primary keywords more to the front
6. Put it all together on the web page

When you are all done the top of your page should look something like this:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Getting Started

My content text…

At this point hopefully you should feel comfortable doing some basic search engine optimization to your website pages. It's not really a difficult or complicated process but it can most certainly be time consuming. Have fun and Happy Optimizing.

Tips & Tricks for Search Engine Optimization

Introduction

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Getting Started we explored the basic concepts of search engine optimization. We'll now take the next step and look at some of the best tips and tricks to improve your rankings even more. If you are new to search engine optimization we encourage you to read Part 1 in order to familiarize yourself with the meta tags, titles, keywords and descriptions before delving into these topics.

More is not always better

If you've done any kind of search engine optimization you've probably had the "What if…" conversation with yourself. For example, "What if I repeat my page description using my important keywords in different ways?" This results in descriptions like "Curious about search engine optimization (SE0)? We are all about search engine optimization (SE0). We give you search engine optimization (SE0) ideas. We also have search engine optimization (SE0) tricks. We know about search engine optimization (SE0)." Lovely to read and incredibly informative isn't it?

The fact is that this type of mind numbing repetition will probably not improve your rankings one bit. When optimizing there is one cardinal rule:

1. 1. Never try to "trick" a search engine because it's probably already been tried.

Search engines employ thousands of brilliant minds and they know how to filter out the tricks. In fact, using little tricks can often lower your rank or in some cases get you banned completely. The bottom line is that it is just not worth the effort or the risk

The power of the link

We've all done it - "Click here for details". It works and if the viewer reads the preceding content it makes perfect sense. However, from a search engine's perspective it makes no sense at all. The search engine ties the words "click" and "here" to the content of the destination page instead of relevant keywords that pertain to the destination page.

When creating anchor links always try to compose the wording in the anchor to contain keywords relevant to the destination page. A well constructed anchor to this article would look something like:

  Learn more about Search Engine Optimization 

The

factor

It may sound outdated but

tags still have some relevance when it comes to search engine optimization. The simple logic, according to search engines, is that if the words are bigger they must be more important. This is basically a holdover from the early days of the internet and internet search engines. With the now widespread use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) it seems like this type of optimization would have been phased out long ago but it still has relevance with most search engines.

Now, does that mean I should use

tags around all my body content and define H1 in my style sheet as content sized text? Absolutely not. Again, that is one of those tricks that search engines have already thought of and this type of practice will not benefit you in the least. Your best bet is to use

tags logically on your page and define the style as larger text within your style theme.

For some of you this will mean redefining your styles and page content to use the H1 style defnition instead of a custom style like "ContentHeader" that you have already defined and implemented. If you have a large site to optimize this can seem like a daunting task. In those cases I suggest you simply duplicate your custom style with a H1 style definition and then slowly change your content over time as it makes sense with your optimization goals.

Now, your next question is likely to be "Is this worth the effort?" That's the big question. As I have stated before, all search engines give different weight to different factors and no two engines are exactly the same. It's up to you to determine if the reward is worth the effort. My suggestion is that you set up an H1 style and test it out on about 10 pages then see how much it makes a difference before committing to a complete overhaul of your website.

The naming of the page

This one may sound a bit silly but the file name of your page can have an impact on rankings. Believe it or not, many search engines actually parse out the file name of the page and log any discernable keywords they find. So, if your page's URL address is something cryptic like "http://www.mydomain.com/pageset1/subset35/az-0982.html" then search engines are not picking up on anything useful in the URL. If at all possible it is best to create URL paths that make sense to a search engine. An example of a search engine friendly URL would be "http://www.mydomain.com/articles/ search_engine_optimization/tips_and_tricks.html". Obviously this type of naming convention is not always possible depending on how your page is served but it is a good practice when you can make it happen.

I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map

Always make it easy for search engine crawlers to navigate your website. Your best bet is to build a site map page and place a link to the site map on every single page of your website, usually in the footer. This practice will ensure that a crawler can easily navigate your website and catalog every page. If you have never created a site map before it's as simple as compiling a link list for all the pages in your website, organizing them into logical sections and then placing all those organized links on a single page. If there are pages you don't want to be cataloged by search engines such as unmanaged blog entries or administration pages, be sure to exclude them from your link list.

Getting linked

This is without a doubt the hardest optimization to accomplish, getting other websites to link to your website. It's even harder to get websites to link to your site using good anchor naming practices like we discussed in The power of the link.

So, how do you get other websites to link to your site? Well, that is kind of a catch 22 situation. You need good rankings so that your pages can be found and linked by more websites to improve your rankings. You always have the option of using services that contact relevant websites in an effort to get other sites to link to yours but that can often be cost prohibitive and have less than impressive results. You can also use link exchange services where your banner or text links appear on other websites in a random rotating fashion but this method is too hit and miss with no significant results for improving rankings or driving traffic to your website.

Your best bet for getting links of good quality to your website is to first offer a page that offers suggestions on how to link to your website page including the actual HTML script for the anchor link. This will increase your chances that other sites will provide links to your pages that use good anchor link text. Second, you should put a "link to our website" suggestion on every page that you are trying to get linked. Third, improving traffic through advertising or any other method that you can think of will go a long way in getting more links to your site. Lastly and most obvious is to have relevant quality content.

Now, there is one catch to all of this linking business. Just because you have more pages linking to your site doesn't mean that you will always have the best rank. The results generally factor in not just the number of pages that link to yours but also the number of unique domains. That simply means if a competitor website page has 3000 links from 2500 different domains while your website page has 4500 links from 1200 different domains that the competitor website will probably receive a higher rank.

But what about … ?

There are many other topics to optimization that we have not covered here. There are even topics within topics in this article such as XML site maps that we did not have the space to discuss. In a future article we take on some of the more advanced topics in search engine optimization in an effort to cover as many of the good search engine optimization practices as possible.

SEO is not an exact science

Don't expect your improvements to yield the exact same results on all search engines. When optimizing your website you should take more of a blanket approach. Try to improve your results across the board. Once you see the results that you are looking for you can then start making tweaks to improve results even further for your primary target search engine. Since Google currently handles more searches than all other search engines combined I would focus my efforts on Google.

Search engines are also continually redefining how they rank results and will often make changes without making public the changes. This makes it extremely difficult to keep up with trends. I suggest you make it a point to review search engine optimization trends and factors at least twice each year to maintain and possibly improve your rankings. Good luck and happy optimizing!