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Search Engine Optimzation

SEO (search engine optimization) is often regarded as a mythical un-masterable collection of cheats to have Google place your page higher than others. The reality is far from mythical, though there are plenty of myths about SEO itself. There’s little tips and tricks (which I’ll cover here) but a recent presentation I attended by SEO experts SearchingWorks Inc. revealed both a surprising and obvious secret. Search engines are an ever-evolving organisms which become more powerful (and useful) everyday. A few years ago SEO was more akin to black market trickery with tactics such as

<META name=”keywords” content=”digital camera, digital camera, digital camera, digital camera, digital camera, digital camera”>

Gone are those days and good riddance! Modern SEO can be boiled down to this 1 mantric question: “Are my pages logical?”

Google and similar search engines are governed by 2 simple elements. The “bot” and people who use the net. A bot is a confusing algorithm of mathy sciencey pixie dust worth untold millions of dollars. Put plainly though a bot will “crawl” your pages to determine what content it contains. That’s it. The search engine then uses human factors such as visits, time spent on pages, number of “organic” links from other pages and a few other factors to determine how desirable your page’s content is versus content of a similar nature, on other pages. Simple right? Don’t worry if you said no, it’ll make sense in a moment!

To understand SEO, you first have to understand what a bot “sees”. The meta tags are almost completely irrelevant (*gasp*!). The number of times a word is repeated on a page is also irrelevant (*double gasp*!). What matters a great deal though, is your headlining text. The page title is a good indicator of page content, no? Well it should be, and this is possibly the greatest weight in determining relevance to searched-for content. A header such as the title of this post is also a good indicator of the content that follows it and subsequent headers are good indicators of the content that follows them. So use your headers well! Stay away from font tags and make good use of CSS.

Make good use of the <TITLE> tag:

• Well-written, unique title paired with strong content helps position in search index
• 50-75 characters in length (66 are displayed)
• Lead with the important word (not always the company name)
• Compelling titles invite clicks by search engine users
• By comparison, keyword meta tags are all but useless

Another powerful indicator of page content is the pictures it contains. This also keeps visitors engaged. Have you ever been searching for something, land on a plain text page and just leave cause there’s no pictures? We all have. Search bots can’t determine the content of pictures (with the exception of the presence of a face) but the “alt” or “alternate” text is used as an indicator to the pictures content. When an image doesn’t load for any reason, the alternate text shows. Making the “alt” text relevant to the image’s content is smart for both SEO purposes and if your image doesn’t show. Makes sense right?

Contrary to popular belief, the number of times a term is mentioned in an article (“keyword density”) will not make that article rank higher for relevance to that term. It’s a myth! It screams unprofessional (or perhaps just incompetent) to have content that appears to be written for search engines.

Keyword density doesn’t allow for:

• Location of terms on a page
• Usage or terms in context
• Proximity of terms in context
• Contextual use of terms in comparison to other documents
• Synonymy, plurality, other contextual variations

Lesson: don’t write like you’re trying for hits. Write like you want the reader to be engaged with your content. Search engines have gotten smart about keyword determination, but if you really want worth-while visitors, you need to make it human friendly too.

Guidelines for keyword placement:

• Once in the title, possible twice as a variation
• Once in an H1 tage on the page
• 3x or more in the body
• Once in bold (at least)
• Once in the meta-tag description
• In the anchor text pointing to the page (links from other pages!)

Doing all of the above will make for pages that index the best they can. That is something entirely different however from pages that pull a lot of visitors! To get many loyal visitors, you must produce content those reads will read and you must keep them engaged with frequent, high quality updates. One of the greatest ranking factors is how many other high ranking sites link to your own. A second mantric question you should ask yourself is “Is my content desirable?”. It’s hard work, I know, but make it on to the google-podium for hard-to-rank terms organically, and you’re getting the SEO holy grail – free advertising.

If you’d like to read more on the matter, LifeHacker has a short and to the point SEO article here or head over to SEOmoz which has an excellent, free and quite complete guide to search engine optimization here. Getting quality visitors is about producing quality content too however – for guidance there I’d recommend Gerry McGovern and his book “Killer Web Content”.