Search Engine Optimistion
Help for small scale web sites to get found...
I am currently producing some articles on SEO to help people to understand the fundamentals of getting their sites into the engines. No visitors = no point in having a web page. So here I will discuss the main engines / directories and try to give you a kick start....
Spam
Search engine spam is difficult to define. People will argue that there are legitimate uses for all the spam techniques. I find that these are not needed if the site is properly done and would not take the risk anyway. The only techniques that are likely to pass unnoticed by the search engines are the fairly advanced ones, and they are beyond the scope of this document.
Common techniques include hiding text within the page, either by making it the same colour as the background or by placing it behind an image or using CSS to place it behind another element. This is detectable and will be penalised. There are plenty more techniques, but I urge you to put up content for people and not spiders and so do the search engines. Even if it is (currently) undetectable by the engines, your competitors or disgruntled anti spam zealots can find and report it.
Keywords
People search using keywords. They type these into a search engine and the search engine looks for pages which have these keywords on. The engine then ranks the pages based on lots of other factors like incoming links, number of keyword instances and where they occur (h1, ALT or body etc).
Simply put, you are going to optimise for your keywords and to do this, you could really do to know what they are :-).
To do this, think what your main keywords are, and feed them to a tool to get all the derivatives and the number of searches a month for that keyword (good keywords will do). Type the main keyword in and look at the derivatives (I use Overture UK feature for this) and the count. The count is the number of searches in the last month on overture sites, so should include MSN, Yahoo! etc. You can use the copy list function and stuff all this into excel and tabulate multiple uses of the software to figure out what the most searched keywords are. Concentrate on the top 5 to 10 of them.
Rankings
Without knowing where you rank now, any optimisation will be more difficult to measure. Luckily there are free tools that will let you check your rankings on a given keyword.
Using Marketleap run the search engine saturation feature first. This will tell you how many of your existing pages are indexed by some of the key engines. Figure out how many pages you actually have so you can see if your site is fully indexed yet (or at all).
Next, take the top 10 keywords from before and use the keyword verification button to see if you place for any of the keywords. Run as many of these as you can be bothered to, make sue you catch all the main keyword for your site.
Finally, run the link checker and note how many links you have to your site. All this data should give a nice baseline to work from and help you see if your efforts are providing an improvement.
Titles
The page titles on your site are important. The title tells the user what the document is about, so it is a prime place for your keywords. Keep the title short and descriptive and do not try to 'stuff' it full of keywords.
Page structure
The search engines index text, not html tags, JavaScript or CSS. Many sites have a huge amount of the document dedicated to layout tables, script and style information, commonly at the top of the document. Try to bring your content up, move CSS and JavaScript into separate files (a good idea anyway) and look at why you need so much html to layout your site. New standards compliant CSS sites use CSS to describe the layout and each section is contained within div tags. The upshot of this is that you can put your content first, and still have the layout you want.
Use h1 and b tags where appropriate. Keywords in heading tags and bold are seen to be more important and rank a little better. You want to tell the search engine that this page is highly relevant to this keyword, but make sure the emphasis flows with the page.
Currently it is recommended to have 584 to 980 words per page for Google. Take this as a recommendation; avoid pages with no content and pages with huge amounts of text. Splitting the page up into several pages means you can focus on different keywords on each page as well.
META
META information is all the stuff in the documents HEAD area, like the title and description. We've already looked at titles, but the rest of this information can be quite important. META is described as information about a document.
The description is used by many search engines to provide the snippet about the document and as such should encourage the user to click on it.
The keywords META is no longer used by most search engines as it is so vulnerable to spam. Having it in there can't hurt, and may serve as a reminder to you of what the keywords are for that document.
Robots
ALT
Links
Links are very important for two reasons: they bring traffic to your site and they influence your position in the SERPs. Google particularly like s links and the method it uses to calculate them could take up a whole book! Basically, each link to your site is valued by taking the page rank of the linking page, dividing it by the number of links on the page and then this resulting page rank goes into your site. Of course this means your site now has more page rank, which means your links to other sites are now worth more... so this process is iterative and only worked out monthly or close to it.
This cascade of page rank is why links from authoritative sites is so important. A Yahoo! directory page often has PR4 or above so a link from this page is well worth having. Good links like this is what sends search engine spider your way as well.