Search engine secrets

SEO (search engine optimization) is a broad topic. To get very good SEO, it’s going to take time, maintenance and care from everyone who creates copy for the site. In my contracts, when I design a site I build a good foundation for SEO right from the beginnning and offer a basic level of SEO optimization. Coding the site well, creating relevant copy, adding a sitemap, etc. are great first steps. But earning good page rankings in the search engines (and keeping them) takes ongoing work and some trial and error.

The best time to consider SEO is right from the very beginning. But like anything else, you will get as much out of something as you put into it. Here is a short list of must do’s for SEO when you are building your site. If your site is established, try and do as many of them as you can.

1. First research and determine the main keywords you’d like to optimize for. These keywords are what you are expecting people to type into a search engine when they are looking for the sorts of information, products or services you offer. For example, if you were the Spice Girls, you’d probably want to have keywords like “music”, “spice girls”, “buy spice girls cd”, the names of each spice girl (forgive, if I don’t know them…), catch phrases that the fans know (again, forgive me), etc.

2. Once you have your main overall keywords, move to keywords on a per page level. I know this sounds crazy-time-consuming (and it can be), but the more carefully your keywords relate to the topic on each individual page, the better you’ll do.

3. Google has a very useful tool to help you choose your keywords. It can be found at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2. The best thing about this, is you can type in something you think would be good, and it will tell you how many people have used that word or phrase. Even better, it will make a list of popular synonyms along with their number of hits.

4. Code the site with modern xHTML using divs and CSS, not tables. Also, try to use the tags for what they were meant to be used for. For example, use heading tags like

   ‹h1›,‹/h1› and ‹h2›,‹/h2›

   for your headings. That in particular is important. Research has proven that semantic html and css based sites to have better SEO.

5. Carefully choose your meta descriptions, meta keywords and especially HTML titles on each page. Your choices should reflect the unique content on each page, and shouldn’t be repeated too much (you might get penalized). You will usually see both the titles you choose and meta descriptions in Google search results. Google ignores meta keywords, but other since other search engines do use them, I recommend not ignoring them.

6. Your site should have a sitemap, and you should submit it to Google, Yahoo and MSN.

7. Search Engine Friendly URLs. If you have a static site (like a normal Dreamweaver site), this is less of an issue. However, with a content management system such as Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal, you need to turn on a special feature so you get clean urls like: www.jasongallagher.org/portfolio/graphic-design.html rather than ones like www.jasongallagher.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=3&Itemid=15. Search engines tend to not like these type of urls.

8. Name the files in your site with keywords in mind. Don’t use spaces, use a _ or an – instead if you need space. If you are using a CMS, there is usually a way to name the file names. In Joomla, this is called a “title alias”.

9. Start a Google Analytics Account and place the Google code in your site. With Analytics, you can keep an eye on your visitor statistics in order to track many things. You’ll want to know which pages, blog posts, products, etc. get the most traffic. How people found you, what keywords they used, how long they stay, what pages cause people to leave in disgust and where they went, etc. This is your treasure trove of information you’ll need to determine which adjustments to make to your site and content over time. If the site is designed well it will certainly help, but the playing field is always changing it's not so easy to get it 100% right on the first try. Monitoring and making adjustments is one of the main secrets to getting good SEO.

Other important factors for good SEO and marketing

1. I can’t stress this more. The first, last and most important thing about search engines (and marketing/usability in general) is that the copy should be well written and organized. All copy, including headlines, product descriptions or whatever, should be written carefully to support the topic at hand, with your researched keywords in mind.

2. Other sites linking to your site, from their site. This is the second biggest part of the whole equation. If a lot of big sites link to you, it will give you a big boost, perhaps even if some of the rest of this is ignored.  Barring that, having a lot of smaller-medium sites link in is next best. This can be achieved in various ways. One way is to simply ask, but probably more effective if you offer to trade. It’s important to note that Google will put a higher value to sites that relate to your site when they link to you. Too many sites that don’t relate might actually lower your page rank. So don’t even bother with spammy link exchange sites or other Las Vegas style tactics.

3. The main way to get people linking to you, is to post interesting and relevant content for that site's audience. Good information is an attractive thing to link to. Even if you are a products site, you should strongly consider coming up with some articles or news that others will find interesting. Besides attracting incoming links, this of course will be attractive to your own customers. Having your site as a source of information in a topic they are interested, will keep them coming back.

4. Have fresh content. Don't let your site sit stagnant for ages. New, fresh content keeps people coming back for more.

5. If you have the interesting content, you might want to explore using RSS feeds. Since IE7 and Firefox (and others) have built in feed readers, these have become popular. Functionality for providing live RSS feeds is built right into CMS’s and is usually working right out of the box. They are a little trickier on a static site, but Dreamweaver has the capability if you learn how to use it.

6. You can also pull RSS feeds from other sites into your site. This is a way to get relevant content which is regularly updated by someone else, directly in your site. Having the content actually on your site (with a credit to the author) instead of just a link, can help fill in your site and keep it fresh. When done conservatively it's great (many reputable sites do it), but be careful that you have permission to do this. Again, it's easier with a CMS but you can make it happen with any site.

7. Add Community Features. By this I mean forums, blogs that accept comments, reviews, survey/polls, newsletters, user profiles, etc. This is a big topic on its own so I’m afraid, you’ll have to wait for a later posting on Out of the fog, into the Blog.

8. Lastly, think like the search engines. Search Engines like Google are trying as hard as they can to deliver the most relevant results to their customers, the people who are doing the searches. They want them to find the best sites that relate to their search. Used car dealer optimization techniques don’t fool them anymore, so it’s best just to make a great site.