The Magic of Good SEO Techniques

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is a series of techniques that you can do to improve your ‘SERP’s, or Search Engine Result Pages… where you end up when someone is searching for your website.  Everyone would like to be number one – but in reality – that’s going to be very difficult to achieve.  There are too many other people fighting for a number one listing for you to hope to rank as number one for your selected keywords.

The fact that it will be virtually impossible for you to rank number one, however, is no excuse for not doing everything you can to rank in the first few pages of Google.  (or, for that matter, other search engines.) Unless your website is truly the number one choice of Google’s algorithms for the keyword or phrase, you won’t see such a ranking.  If your website is a niche market, and there isn’t a great deal of competition – you can indeed take the first place.  But anything on the first or second page is almost equally valuable – so your objective is to be among the first 20 listings.

SEO Checklist

• Domain Name – Having a good domain name doesn’t have a tremendous effect – but its a piece of the puzzle… if you’re lucky enough to have a domain name with your chosen keywords in the domain name – it can help you with the search engines… my BestJudo.com website, for example, includes the keyword "Judo" – and helps my ranking in that niche.

• Web Page URL – Using keywords here can help you as well – if you have a blog page about SEO, for example – it would be far better to have the URL of that web page to be "http://www.burningknife.com/article/basics-good-search-engine-optimization", instead of what many Content Management Systems will automatically create for you, such as "http://www.burningknife.com/?q=node/83". The first example is known as a "clean URL", and most good CMS’s will allow you to form these "clean URL’s" – so take the time to do it right. Don’t use under_scores – "basics_good_search_engine_optimization" is seen by a spider as "basicsgoodsearchengineoptimization" – use only hyphens – which spiders correctly interpret to separate the words.

• Web Page Content – Shoot for somewhere between 200-750 words, if an article is going to be longer – break it into separate web pages.  Many SEO experts will argue about your keyword "density" – arguing that your keywords should constitute 5%, or 10% or 20% of your web page – I prefer to go the opposite route – I just make my article interesting and informative.  Watching my logs, I’ve seen people coming to my sites using terms that I’d never have thought of – so rather than plan my keywords – I just shoot for informative, and somewhat longer articles.

• Web Page Construction

  1. Skip the Flash intros – they look pretty, but are a disaster for SEO

  2. Frames are a no-no. Although search engine spiders are getting better at figuring out framed websites – the disadvantages of frames far outweigh the few advantages.

  3. Call Javascript & CSS as external files – use sparingly. When you use Javascript for your fancy dropdown menus – the spiders can’t follow them, so include links at the bottom of your page.

  4. Search Engine Spiders always refuse cookies – Have you ever been to a web page that says: "Your browser must accept cookies for this site to function properly"? Search engine spiders will simply move on to another website – and you just lost the opportunity to have your content indexed. Don’t hide your content behind mandatory cookies.

  5. Take a look at your web page source – if you have more HTML than you have content – revise it! Content is king – search engine spiders want to see lots of content, not HTML elements.

  6. Sitemap – build one, it helps the spiders index your entire website. Google even helps you with a free Sitemap Generator.

• <title>Web Page Title</title> should be short – no more than about 7 words – contain keywords if natural, and correctly match the contents of the web page. Don’t try to fool the search engines! Every web-page should have it’s own unique title.

• <h1>Web Page Header</h1> – use one single <h1> header tag on every page – and support it with <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc… tags as necessary. Don’t confuse a spider with multiple <h1> elements on a single web page. The spider should have no doubt what the topic of your web page is.

• Metatags – Due to misuse, most search engines now ignore metatags – but it may change in the future – and there’s no downside risk.  Go ahead and put at least the basic metatags in every web page.  I recommend as an absolute minimum the following two tags:

  HTML
  <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, "key phrase1", "key phrase2" – use about 30-40 unique words">
  
  <meta name="description" content="An accurate description of your webpage, using keywords – about 150 characters">
  XHTML
  <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, "key phrase1", "key phrase2" – use about 30-40 unique words" />
  
  <meta name="description" content="An accurate description of your webpage, using keywords – about 150 characters" />

  I also like to add a number of other metatags to my web pages, particularly when trying to keep spiders away from indexing particular web pages. Using <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> will stop search engine spiders from indexing or following the links on a particular web page.

• <b>Bold Text</b> – Opinions vary as to whether this is effective or not – but I see no reason not to bold important concepts and keywords – they help the reader, and may very well help the spider make sense of your page.

• Image Alt Text – Example: <img src="image.gif" alt="Your alt text here"> Your images should all have the alt text tag that describes what the image is – spiders don’t see images – this is another place to put content for spiders, why would you avoid it? Please, no keyword stuffing – just a one sentence description of the image that is there, nothing more.

• Link Titles – Just like Alt Text for images, you can supply a title for links as well. Again – another place to add content to your site, it looks like this: <a href="another-page.html" title="This is a link title.">Another Page</a>

• External & Internal Links – Many people will tell you to avoid external links unless absolutely necessary – I don’t subscribe to that view – I prefer to put together an informative web page that people will get real value out of – and that sometimes means linking to other websites. There are times when I just don’t care what effect it may have on my search engine ranking – quality pages will float to the top regardless. I suspect that Google will not penalize you for linking to external authority sites – that is simply a natural and normal thing for authority sites to do, so why not your site? As for internal links, every web page you put together should link to at least one other page on your site… and your home page should have a link to your sitemap.

There are no real tricks to good SEO work – it’s simply merging proper web page construction with good content. Search engines are constantly trying to put the very best web page forward for a given search – and if your web page is informative, and easy for a search engine spider to make sense of and to index, you will be ahead of the SEO game. This means that your web pages will rank on the first or second page – and you’ll get the organic traffic you need from searches.

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