Concise Guide to Search Engine Optimization

The Layman's Concise Guide to Search Engine Optimization

So you want to improve your web site's rankings in the search engines, but don't want to spend money or do anything silly like create a link farm or hire a consultant. How do you improve your site's visibility? How to structure your pages to get the highest ranking? What about links? Below you will find a concise and clear guide to simple search engine optimization using common and easily done techniques.

This is not the be-all and end-all of search engine optimization techniques. This article is a concise introduction to optimizing your web site for search engine visibility without spending a lot of money or huge amounts of time. Use this as a starting point and work the techniques described, then you can move on to more advanced, higher cost, or more time-consuming methods.

Relevant Links

Good Content

You need good, clear content that people want to read or look at. This is paramount; if you don't have anything that web searchers want to see, then no one will link to you or come back to visit your site. Traffic is generated by content, and the more traffic you get the bigger your visibility. Whether your content is articles, computer code, graphics, tutorials, online services, or fiction, content is king. Try to make your content unique, or as unique as possible; don't copy things you've found elsewhere on the web. Make the content well organized and navigable so people can find what they want quickly. Put your content early in the page, don't have a lot of graphics, tables or flash before the content. If the first sentence on a page is an advertisement for someone else, is that really what you want the search engines to see?

Clean Markup Code : Part 1 : Tables, Frames and JavaScript

Your code needs to be as clean and lean as possible. Concentrate on that; keep the code neat and unobtrusive. If you're using JavaScript, put it in a file and link it into your pages; don't load each page with a ton of script code. You can use the following code to link in javascript files, this is the most compatible way to do it: 

            <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="file.js"></script>

Don't use frames, as attractive as the idea may be. Frames are a good method of providing navigation but unfortunately search engines don't deal well with them. They tend to crawl only one frame, or a part of a frame, usually not the one you want. Your content gets ignored because it's in a frame that doesn't get crawled by the search engine. Similarly, keep tables to a minimum. Use CSS for layout purposes, instead of tables. Tables are good for presenting tabular data, so keep it that way. Nested tables are the worst, avoid them if possible. Why? Because you don't want the search engine(s) indexing table markup code. What you want indexed is the content, but if the search engine encounters too much table code (hard to tell how much is too much) what it will index is that markup code, so your search engine listing will look like this: 
TABLE COL=3 WIDTH=100 ROWS=10

Clean Markup Code : Part 2 : HTML, XHTML, Headings, Titles and Meta Tags

Search engines tend to reward newer technology in your code, as long as that code is clean and unobtrusive; meaning, use very clean HTML or XHTML with CSS to keep content as separate as possible from layout. Search engines don't care about your layout, they only crawl the content, so separate layout as much as possible and write your code in newer, leaner versions of HTML or XHTML. Keep your headings descriptive, use keywords as headings whenever possible. Keep titles descriptive and clean; a good rule of thumb is to make the title descriptive and then put the section and site after that, like so Page Description : Section Description : Web Site Title. Write a meta description for each page, don't just use the same one over and over; write something unique that describes that page. Go ahead and use meta keyword tags, just don't go overboard. Remember that the description and page content will count more than the keyword tags, so concentrate on putting the keywords into those. Keep your H1 headings to one per page, then use H2, H3, etc. Use the B or STRONG tag to mark important words, but don't go wild with it; use it to mark words or phrases that should be emphasized to the reader. Remember that while graphics make pretty headings, search engines can't read graphics. Use text headings.

Meta Tag Formats

Here are some formats for various meta tags that you can use on your web site to increase search engine visibility. These are not, by any means, the only thing you need to do. Some search engines ignore them, or only partially use them in a complex formula to determine your page visibility. Adding these tags to your pages helps, a lot, but don't stop there.
Description Tag Format
<meta name="description" content="Layman's concise guide to search engine optimization on the web." />
Keywords Tag Format
<meta name="keywords" content="pisarsky,kevin pisarsky,search engine optimization,optimize,web,search" />
Robots Tag Format
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
Revisit Tag Format
<meta name="revisit-after" content="30" />

Keywords and URLs

Think about what keywords people will use to find your page or site. Put those keywords into each page title, meta description tag and meta keywords tag as well as featuring them on the page content itself. Put keywords or synonyms into your headings. Do not go overboard and overload the page with keywords, be sure that what you write makes sense. Make your keywords as unique as possible. Try to put your keywords into the first sentence on the page as much as possible, then use the rest of the page to describe that sentence or expound on the subject. Make your links friendly, as in short and to the point. When creating a directory structure for your site, use keywords as directory names and page file names. Keep your directory structure shallow, don't make it ten levels deep. Make it easy for each page to be easily linked by keeping the URLs short and to the point.

Internal Linking

Create links from each page to other pages on your site whenever it is relevant. Use your keywords as the links. Make sure each page has links to all other sections of the site, including back to the root of the site. Links are good, use them wisely. Besides making navigation easier, they help the search engine figure out the structure of your web site. Menus are cool and make for good navigation, but be sure to have each link on a menu also in the content of the page. Use link bars at the top and bottom of each page. In short, each page should be linked to all other sections of your site, plus any individual pages that are related.

External Linking

The more people who link to you, the better. Don't use external link farms or techniques like embedding non-visual links, though; search engines will see right through that. Create links on your pages to external sites who have relevant content, especially high-traffic sites that are related to your own content in some way. Encourage other sites to link to your pages, this goes along with good content; if you have good content people will link to you.

Robots.txt File

Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your web space; it can help you by making sure that search engine robots don't crawl or index things that you don't want indexed. This isn't just content that you're hiding from search engines, but also content that won't help your page rank by being indexed. For example, suppose you have several pages or folders that contain information which is only helpful to yourself as the webmaster. Why have a search engine index that stuff? Keep those search bots indexing pages that will help you! Suppose you have a few pages of tabular data that only makes sense if you've seen the pages in order? Don't let the search engines index it separately! In short, use your robots.txt file to keep search engines robots focused on the pages you want them focused on. In the related links section on this page are a link to a robots.txt tutorial and a validator to check your work.

URL Submission

Go ahead and submit your URL to as many free directories as possible; all these are links back to your pages. A good one is the Open Directory Project, which will add your site to a category. Choose your categories well, make sure they are descriptive of how you want your web site seen. Be sure that your site is as close to finalized as possible before submitting it; you don't want incomplete pages crawled because it may only be done once, or once in a while. Best to wait until your site is as nearly complete as it will get before submitting it.

Results

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. You don't have to spend your life on it, just keep working the techniques until you're getting the results you want. Know that the results will take time to come in; search engines won't crawl your new web site immediately and results won't be immediate. It can, and probably will, take months before you see any concrete results. Don't think your techniques aren't working; they just take time. While you work on your optimization, use measurement techniques to see how you're doing. The related links section on this page includes links to sites which will test your traffic ranking, page ranking, and simulate a search engine spider on your site. Use these tools to check your work.

More Tools

Use the link:www.mydomain.com command in Google and MSN to see all sites that link to yours. For Yahoo, use linkdomain:www.mydomain.com. Use the command site:www.yourdomain.com as a search query in any of the big three search engines to measure saturation; finding out what pages are crawled.

Web server access statistics

One other tool to measure search engine success is to read your web site access statistics. This is individual to your server and hosting, but critical. The statistics will tell you not only who is accessing your web site, but also a number of things that will help measure your rankings and traffic in relation to search engines:

Analysis

Google offers a free tool to help with marketing analysis of your web site, called Google Analytics, which will give you detailed reports on site statistics: who visited, how long they stayed, which pages they lingered on, etc.

Site Maps

There are two kinds of site maps: the maps on your site, and the kind that are used strictly by search engines. For the maps on your own site, use whatever format you wish, just make sure that the site map is easily searchable by search engines and that it's readable by web users. Having a sitemap increases your internal linking and your site navigation and so helps your search engine rankings. The type of site map that is used by search engines is usually an XML or compressed XML file which indexes your site for a search engine and both speeds up and specifies the indexing of pages and files on your site. To begin with, you need to generate or write the XML file for your site. This may not be a simple process. Google has an FAQ about how to generate and write sitemap files for their service.

Conclusion

These are the basic techniques for search engine optimization. When you have exhausted these, you can get into sites like SEO Chat, Search Engine Watch, and others that get down to the nitty gritty of optimization.