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Simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — Part 1

Many of my clients ask me about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for their websites. SEO is both simple and complicated. The complicated part is keeping up with all the latest “tricks” and constantly researching what the search engines are up to, which are the dominant players in the market, current analytical test results, the best strategies (for this week, at least), determining the difference between “white-hat” and “black-hat” techniques, and deciding whether to risk employing “black-hat” ones. These sorts of activities are what most “SEO Professionals” occupy themselves with. To implement this sort of complicated SEO on your website requires one of these dedicated people, generally charging a hefty monthly fee. The simple SEO is what I generally advise my clients about, because it is something they can easily understand and handle themselves. It's safe (all “white-hat”), and instead of using techniques designed to “trick” the search engines, follows recommendations from the search engines themselves about what they want. There are basically three pieces to this “simple SEO.” Part 1 will cover the first two. Part 2 will cover the last one and discuss hiring a professional SEO Company.

SEO-Friendly Programming

There are some things your web developer can do when creating your website that will make it easy for the search engines to index accurately.

The first thing has to do with your website design and general coding – clean, standards-compliant HTML & CSS code will ensure that the search “spiders” or “robots” (little programs the search engines send out to read all the websites online) will have no trouble getting around and indexing your web pages. All the important text on your website should be actually coded as text – rather than as an image or flash file. The spiders cannot read the text inside pictures or most flash movies.

Another thing that helps the spiders get around your site efficiently is to have a good internal linking structure. Every page on your site that you want to be indexed should be linked to other pages from the homepage. The spiders get around by following links, so you need links from the homepage into all the pages of your website to insure that they get to see everything.

Finally, in order to help the search engines understand your content, it helps to use semantic markup, which means that your site uses HTML tags to indicate the relative importance of words and phrases on your pages. Using heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc) to organize your content helps the search engines understand what a page is about, as well as what the important sub-topics are. Another way to indicate the main topic of your pages is for each page to have a unique <title> metatag that describes the page.

Juicy Content

Search engines are voracious – and what they most like is big, fat, juicy content that is frequently updated. What this means to you is that the best way to keep the search engines coming back to your website is to give them lots to chew on. Also, continually adding new content to your site will let them know that your site is current, which is very important to them. Having your new content highlighted on your homepage is a great way to keep them – as well as your human visitors – interested. If you can dedicate pages of content on your site to desired keyword phrases, all the better.

Web Action Steps

  • If you have a website currently:
    • Check out your search ranking for your main desired keyword phrases.
    • Evaluate your site for good semantic markup and title tags.
    • Contact your web developer to make any necessary improvements.
  • If you are working on a new website:
    • Make sure your web developer understands these basic elements
    • Discuss your graphic design, let your designer know that you don’t want it to require too much flash or text-in-images that can't be indexed.
  • Be sure that whoever is putting content on your site is adding the correct heading tags and assigning unique page titles.
  • If you use a Content Management System (CMS) for your website, check that you understand how to assign the heading tags to your own content properly.
  • Determine where you can add keyword-rich content to your website – press releases, articles, and blog posts are good candidates – and commit to updating your site once a week at least.

Having a search-engine-friendly website can dramatically improve your visibility in the search engines. Continually adding keyword-rich, relevant content can bump you to the top for relevant topics. If you need help creating an optimized website for your business which is easy to update with juicy content, please contact me about how I can help you.