mL's blog
2009-01-31 -- Five Simple Search Engine Optimization tips even beginners can use
Funny, over the last few months, search engine optimization has been one of the big discussions I've been having. It's been a topic of discussion among friends, co-workers, clients and fellow web junkies, to name just a few. Maybe it's the economy driving more people online in search of new business leads, or maybe I've just been listening closer, I don't know. Whatever the cause, I've heard a lot of buzz about it lately. A lot of buzz that could just be voodoo. “Cross your eyes this special way and search engines will rank your pages better.”
Egh, while crossing your eyes might make the number of web visitors to your site appear to double, it's probably just an illusion. ;-) Here are some things that even beginners can do to help improve page rankings... for real!
- Write good content
Good content scores you lots and lots of points. :-) This is the #1 thing that you can do to attract people to your site. And yes, you want to think of it as attracting people, not attracting search engines. The creators of modern search engines are writing increasingly complicated algorithms to help them gauge which content is interesting to actual humans. Some search companies have even hired actual humans to help them rank pages. The question then becomes, what attracts people? You already know the answer. You want things that you can use. Provide useful information for people to use. Make sure your site is also easy to use. Even hideously ugly sites can rank highly if they are easily navigable and provide useful information.
- Title your pages well –
This is one of the first things I teach my students, whether they're learning HTML for the first time or taking my Intro to Dreamweaver class. There is a reason that the title tag is one of the first things that you'll type in your HTML and that the title box is one of the first things that you'll see in Dreamweaver. Titles are important! Make sure your page titles are brief but descriptive. Search engines love that. People love that too, because a page's title is the most prominently featured thing in search results. Even if the content of a page is ingenious, you might be docked some points for calling it something vague like “My stuff”. Also, when you're saving your documents, name the file something descriptive, if possible. For instance, I might name this page simple_SEO_tips.htm.
- Pay attention to document formatting –
I don't necessarily mean graphic design, but instead, the way you design your content. Break your pages into sections with headings and be descriptive with those headings. When possible, use heading tags (<h1> <h2> <h3>) instead of paragraph tags to indicate and title important sections of your pages. Also, make sure you put alt tags on all images. Alt tags provide a very brief description of what the image is of. Search engines, people that are visually impaired, and folks who don't enable images on their browsers need that short textual description. This is good practice, in general, but I bring it up here specifically because headings are sometimes done as a graphic when designers want to use a custom font face.
- Write relevant and descriptive meta tags –
Meta Description and Meta Keywords are two bits of HTML code that you can add to your pages specifically for search engines to see, and almost no one else. There's an ages old rumor that you should brainstorm as many keywords (words that people might search for) as you can and put them in your meta tags or else search engines will be less likely to find your page. Not so much true, though it doesn't hurt to have a short meta description (two sentences is a pretty good average) and between 8-20 relevant keywords. Honestly, I've seen wildly successful pages that included no meta tags at all and pages with great meta tags that never got hits. The quality of your content outweighs you page's other ranking variables many times over.
Make sure your keywords are also present in your content. Don't make it uncomfortable for humans to read, but do use them as they seem to fit. Keywords that are completely unrelated to your content could even cause more harm than good. Here's why: In the old days when the Internet was slow, search engines relied pretty heavily on meta tags so that they wouldn't have to index entire pages. Ultimately, some unscrupulous web publishers learned that they could increase their visits by weaving popular search terms into their meta tags, even if the words had nothing to do with the content of the pages. Search companies began writing smarter and smarter algorithms to keep that from happening and eventually the speed of the Internet increased to the point where indexing the content of entire pages was doable. I haven't ever written pages with bogus meta content, but I have heard (and agree it is deserved) that such a thing should be punishable by page downranking.*shrugs* egh..? Just like when you're writing your content, keep it real with your meta data and you should be good.
- Get linked to from other sites –
Have a "links" page and ask for reciprocal links on reputable sites that are related to yours. Join web rings, participate and post on forums, start up Twitter and other blog pages... these will all help you gain notoriety. But, again, it really all comes back to good content. If you write good content, sites will be more likely to link to you!
I think that's all I can wring from my brain this evening. Time for sleep... Good night!
~mL