Search Engine Optimization for Everyone

Also check out my Web 2.0 and Google Universal Search article, my Long Tail SEO article, Blogging for SEO article and my Linking article.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Having a professionally designed and attractive website is no longer enough to have a successful business presence online. If people can't find your website, all that great design will never get seen by any potential clients. If your website revenue isn't flowing in, one of the problems could be that it's just not getting found by searchers.

There of course could be other problems. If navigation isn't working properly, or you website just doesn't motivate people to buy then sales won't be coming in. However, if you look at your website analytics it will become very clear if the problem is the website design, or if it's the ability for people to find the site in the first place.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of structuring a website more visible to search engines like Google, MSN or Yahoo for selected key words and phrases. The huge advantage of organic search engine optimization is that once you're at the top of the list, all that exposure is then completely free. The first step in this process is to choose which keywords you want to appear for.

KEYWORDS
This may seem like a fairly intuitive process, but you may be surprised at the actual search terms people are using to find businesses. To get started, make a list of words and phrases that you think apply to your product, service or business. Don't forget to add your location to the list if your business pertains to a specific area. A hotel in Manhattan should definitely target “manhattan hotels” but there probably wouldn't be much point in focusing on just “hotels”. Searchers generally realize that they must indicate a location to get relevant localized results. In addition, the advent of personalized search means that search engines like Google know where you are based on your IP address, and if you don't enter a location for what you are looking for, the search engine will presume you're seeking a nearby business and will return websites that are nearby.

Start your keyword list by creating two columns. In the first column, write your list of general one or two word phrases that relate to your business. Then in the second column, note all the locations that may apply to your business. Combine these by crossing each location with each keyword phrase. This should generate a fairly substantial list of combinations. Now, you want to narrow this list down to five or six main keyword phrases to focus on.

Many websites use to list dozens or hundreds of keywords. Now though, major search engines pay virtually no attention at all to the Meta Keyword tag itself. The point of this part of search engine optimization is not to create a huge Meta Keyword list for your HTML code, it's to create a short list of keywords to focus on in the text of your page. You'll definitely want to put the short list in your Meta Keyword tag, but the idea here is to identify more strongly what search terms you want your site to come up for when Google users search. It will be very difficult to create a page that comes up for a huge variety of terms, but by staying focused you'll be able to generate much greater successes.

Once you have your initial combined list, the next step is to research these keywords. First, type the search terms into a search engine yourself. Does your site already come up? Do your competitors come up? You may be able to knock a few terms off your list at this stage if nothing appropriate comes up.

Next, it's time for some more objective research. There are a couple of free tools on the Internet that give you a strong idea of the volume of searches being done for particular search phrases. Google itself offers a great tool called Keyword Generator here . Enter your list of keywords into this tool and select Keyword Search Volume as the data to display. While Google doesn't provide the actual number of searches, it rates each term on a scale of 1-10. The higher the bar, the more searches being done. Make a note of the Google search volume for each of your search terms. The tool will also suggest other related terms, make sure you have a close look at the list for other keyword phrase ideas that might be relevant.

The other handy free tool online is from Yahoo. Overture will actually show a months worth of searches. Enter your search terms one by one and make a note of their search volume. This tool may also display some alternative ideas. If any of them seem appropriate, add them to your list.

Now you should have a spread sheet with your search term combinations as well as their Google and Yahoo search volumes. Pick the top five keyword phrases based on volume. These phrases will now become not only your Meta Keyword tag, but also the focus for all your search engine optimization efforts. There is nothing more critical than this first step in the process. Not only do your keywords have to apply to the product or service you're offering, but people have to actually be searching using those terms.

For more serious webmasters and SEO's, there are paid services that offer more detailed information on keyword phrase volumes. One of the more popular systems is called Keyword Discovery. These services have agreements with various large Internet providers that allows them to generate detailed numbers related to keyword searches. The free resources provided by Google and Yahoo are more than sufficient for most websites, but in highly competitive market niches, services like Discovery can give you an edge on the competition.

Avoid keyword stuffing. This is now either completely ignored or potentially penalized by search engines. A keyword list with hundreds or thousands of terms that have nothing to do with the content of your page could result in your site dropping out of the search engines. While this technique did work at one time, Google has gotten wise to this trick and now it can actually penalize you. Make absolutely sure your Meta Keyword tag list is accurate and relevant. Also make sure those keywords appear throughout the text of the page. A Meta Keyword that doesn't actually appear in your page may also result in a penalty.

Keep in mind you need to do this entire process for each PAGE of your website. Even if your pages are similar, they should have different focuses, different keyword phrases, different tags and different content.

URL
If your webpage already exists, your URL (Uniform Resource Locater), or the www.example.com of your website, will most likely not be able to be changed. If you're just getting started with a new website however, the URL can become a powerful search engine optimization tool.

Choose the strongest keyword phrase from your list, and if possible, try to get a URL with that phrase. For example if your number one phrase is “California Widgets”, try to get a domain name of www.californiawidgets.com. This will automatically and significantly increase your visibility for this search phrase.

If this strategy is unavailable to you, there are many other options. A similar idea is to create a specific page within your site that has a keyword phrase in it. Try www.example.com/california-widgets.html as a page within your site.

HEAD TAGS
When a search engine looks at your page, it doesn't see it like you and I do. It sees the HTML. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTML) code is the basic language of the Internet. If you've never seen HTML, go to the View menu of the Internet browser you're using right now, and select View Page Source, or Source. What comes up is the HTML code for the page. This code is then interpreted by your web browser (Explorer, FireFox, etc.) which then displays what you actually see.

To do your own search engine optimization, you're going to have to become somewhat familiar with HTML code. To be truly effective, you have to be able to see web pages like search engines see them. If HTML is a completely foreign concept to you, check out some resources on the Internet. There are many great tutorials available online for free, including W3Schools and HTML Goodies.

Once you're familiar with HTML code, you can then start editing your own pages and optimizing them for search engines.

Head tags are mostly invisible to the average Internet user. These are snippets of code which occur at the beginning of the HTML code between the <head> and </head> tags. There are a few different types of tags here, including <title>, <meta>, <base>, <link>, <style> and <script> tags. The only two of relevance to SEO are the title and meta tags.

TITLE TAGS
Title tags are currently one of the most critical components of optimizing your HTML tags for search engines. If you look at the top bar of your browser right now, at the very top you'll see the page title. Often completely ignored by humans, the page title is highly relevant and greatly affects your search engine position.

In the code, the title appears between the title tags of <title> and </title>. When your deciding on what to use for a page title, go back to your keyword phrase list. Take the first two or three phrases and try to combine them into a single short phrase that describes the main idea of the page. Combine this phrase with your business name and you've got your page title.

For example, if your keyword phrase is “california widgets”, then a great page title may be “California Widgets - PlasticsCompany Inc.”. Keep the title as short and focused as possible. Creating a long page title with dozens of keywords may actually dilute the effect. Also keep in mind that your page title will usually come up as the title of the listing in search engines. Make sure the title makes sense, and quickly communicates your product or service. Even if you appear in the top ten on a search engine, searchers actually have to know what you're offering before they click and the title is the first thing they see.

Many people have asked whether the name of the company should come at the beginning or the end of the title. It all comes down to what you think people will click on. For the most part if your company is well known and a brand, put it first. If not, put it last. If people are actually searching for your company name, they'll find it regardless of whether it's first or last in the title tag. Try to keep your title less than 70 characters (not words) long.

META TAGS
Some of the most abused HTML code, and most often ignored by search engines, are the Meta tags. While there are many Meta Tags floating around the Internet, there are actually only a few that are of any relevance.

Meta Keywords
Meta Description
Meta Robots
Meta Everything Else

The Meta Keywords tag is almost universally ignored by search engines. The heavy abuse of this tag means that there is virtually no weight or attention paid to them. However there is a case to be made for putting your short five term list here.

In the code, the tag looks like this: <meta name=“keywords” content=“keyword one, keyword 2, keyword 3”/> Put your list in the keyword tag and make sure those phrases appear numerous times throughout the rest of your page. If you have a keyword that doesn't appear in your website page, it may actually result in a penalty.

The Meta Description tag also has very little weight for SEO. The description tag is designed to give a brief synopsis of the topic of the page. It's one or two sentences long. Make sure to include as many of your top keyword phrases as possible while keeping it highly readable.

While it may not have much effect on your search engine placement, it does sometimes appear under your page title in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Some search engines lift other parts of your page to use as a description while others use the actual Meta Description tag. The tag looks like this: <meta name=“description” content= “PlasticsCompany Inc. offers a variety of widgets throughout California.”/>

The Meta Robots tag is important yet often misused. The only purpose for this tag is tell a search engine NOT to index a page. By default, search engine spiders (the programs that actually read your page and send the analysis back to Google) will read your page and follow all the links it can find to the rest of your website.

This is the only Meta Robots tag you should ever use: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">. This tag will stop a spider from reading the page or following the links to other pages. There may be several reasons to do this. For example if the page is a duplicate for printing purposes, as duplicate content may be penalized by search engines, you may want to have the spiders ignore that page.

Any other robots command is pretty much useless. One of the favorite myths of the Internet is the revisit-after command. No major search engine supports this meta tag. It was used by a very small Canadian search engine which doesn't even exist anymore. The idea was to tell the spider to come back and check for new content more often. Unfortunately this code became some kind of legend. If a search engine optimization company puts this in your website code, you know you're dealing with someone who doesn't really know much about search engine optimization!

The robot noindex nofollow commands can also be put into a robots.txt file on your webserver along with a link to an XML sitemap file. You can also give search engines an idea of how often you update the information on your site. Check out robotstxt.org for more information about this file.

Meta Everything Else - There are many other meta tags including author, classification, distribution, copyright, rating, language, revisit-after etc. They are all completely ignored by major search engines and are a waste of code space. Automated keyword generators that are found on the Internet often create a huge pile of these useless tags.

The only reason to use these is if you have a massive website and need some internal classification system. If your own systems can read these tags, they could use them for identifying groups of pages.

The major search engines ignore them, and they may push your actual content further down in the HTML code of your page which could have a small affect on your placement. Don't bother with these tags, and if an SEO company suggest them, consider that a red flag.

The link tag is used to relate two pages. Most commonly this is used with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The tag appears as <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="theme.css" />. This link tells the browser how to present the webpage being visited. Essentially the CSS is a template that can be used to make changes to multiple pages within a website by changing just the CSS file. This is a very smart for two reasons. Firstly, it makes updating large sites easier to deal with from a design standpoint. Secondly, it reduces the amount of HTML code on each of your pages, thereby making it theoretically easier for search engine robots to search and index the much more important textual content of your site.

Before the advent of the CSS, all the code determining fonts, colours and many other display options were either contained within the <style> tag of each page or appeared with the actual elements in the HTML. In some complex pages this resulted in the code getting incredibly long and taking a long time for an Internet browser to load. There has been some speculation this large amount of style code could somehow confuse the robots and cause them to leave your page before they reach the actual content. The theory goes that a search engine will only spend so much time accessing a page and when there is a large amount of code the spider may not read all the actual textual content. While this is highly unlikely, reducing the amount of HTML that search engines aren't going to pay any attention to anyway is not a bad thing. Google is concerned with content, not with style.

BODY CONTENT
By far the most important component in any search engine optimization process is the body text content. The content of your page must speak not only to viewers, but to search engine spiders.

Take your list of keyword phrases and create as much content as you can with them. The more the better. While a high amount of well written text that contains your keyword phrases is the most critical thing, there are some other things you can do within the body text to help your search engine rankings.

Headline tags identify parts of your text as being more important or prominent. The <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc. tags do appear to have some effect. However it has recently been noted that the <h1> headline tag may be overly used and is starting to be ignored. Try placing some key phrases within the <h2> and <h3> tags. Bolding has a similar effect. Don't overuse these though. Only place important keyword phrases in them.

Text links to other sections of your own website can help lend weight to other pages within your site beyond the main page. It helps identify what should be considered as your most important pages so try to link relevant articles and information within your site through text links.

Try also to place important keyword phrases both at the beginning and the end of your textual content. As that reflects standard editorial style, it seems to work in favour of search engine ranking as well.

Do not keyword stuff. By placing excessive amounts of keywords either within your actual text, or trying to trick search engines by using tiny font sizes or text the same colour as a background colour, you'll be penalized and possibly banned.

The strongest possible advice for textual content for any website is to make it relevant, place keywords at appropriate places throughout, and update your information frequently. Blogs are a great way to add content regularly. Google will look more favourably on a website that changes regularly than one that hasn't changed in years.

ALT TAGS
Alt tags are alternative text for images. Back in the beginning of the Internet, many browser programs could not, or would not show images. The introduction of the Alt tag allowed web site creators to assign text to a particular image or picture so that these blind browser programs would have something to display.

If you're not sure about your image Alt tags, right click on a picture on your website and choose Properties from the menu that appears. The text should then be displayed in a box with some other information.

Search engines read Alt tags and it can add to your placement. Place an actual description of the photo, or at least what the photo relates to in the Alt tag for every picture on your website. Not only will search engines appreciate it, but there are now Internet browsers for the blind which will read them aloud for those with disabilities. Make sure to use as many of your keyword phrases as possible within these tags, but don't stuff or repeat them. Each Alt tag should be unique.

SITEMAPS
In order to make sure search engines can find all the pages of your site, you should create either an actual sitemap page which people can view, or a sitemap XML file. Essentially, these both will have links to every page in your website all in one place. Users can quickly find what they are looking for and spiders will be able to find all the content of your site.

XML files can be uploaded directly to Google to make sure your entire site is known to their spiders. If you're unfamiliar with the sitemap.xml protocol, there are several free sitemap generators on the Internet, including freesitemapgenerator.com.

MULTIPLE PAGES
Follow this procedure for every individual page of your site. Each page should have a unique title, description tag, meta tags, alt tags, textual content and targeted keyword phrase list.

Create copy that is both interesting to readers and to search engines and your optimization strategy will pay off with more visitors and higher rankings.

SEO and high rankings on Google can be achieved with great content and page design. If you're not sure where to start, contact an SEO expert like Get Clicked SEO!

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