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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I’m sharing my tips and experience on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) simply because optimizing is a fairly simple process. A lot of folks out there will try to over-complicate it, and it isn’t hard at all. I’ll explain the reasoning behind the methods to apply SEO techniques on web sites.

The Basics

What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization, abbreviated SEO, is the process to tweak your web site or pages for search engine indexing. The result from optimizing your web site will be more visitors accessing what they need from your web site. Two type of SEO: White Hat (good) and Black Hat (bad).

SERPS
Search Engine Result Pages, SERPS for short, are what web surfers view when they search for a keyword. Ranking high for popular keywords is imporant to search engine optimization success.

What are META Tags?
Meta tags are HTML tags to help describe your web site’s content. It is the meta-data for the page, meaning it is the details about the page itself. Meta tags help search engines further classify and categorize your website. However, due to many abusers of Meta tags, search engine optimization entails a few more methods to help your web site.

What is a robots.txt file?
A robots.txt file is an access list for web crawlers to obey when crawling your web site. Essentially, a robots.txt file is designed to block unwanted directories or pages from showing up on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Why optimize your web site?
Search Engines are getting smarter at indexing content. Put yourself in the seat of a web surfer. Without knowing your web address, how will they know about your web site? A majority of your web site’s visitors will come directly from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Those are the big three you want to pay specific attention to. Optimizing your site will help you accomplish one task — increase the accessibility of your web site to search engines. That’s really it. When you make and continue SEO for your web site, traffic will increase and so will your message.

Webmasters sometimes wonder, “What should I optimize?” Optimization should occur in promotional/marketing and the content. Here’s what I mean: Web surfers might be searching for ABC Widget Company … what if they are searching for Blue Widgets? If you only focus on the core web site structure, you will be missing valuable web traffic. Providing accurate and descriptive information for all your products and services will prove to be a valuable asset in promoting your site’s content.

Optimizing Your Web Site One Tag at a Time

  • TITLE Tags: Provide web surfers a concise and clear “punchy” title. Writing anything more than five or so words will have negative results.
  • META Description Tags: These are the tags that some search engines will use for the description field for your website. Making a catchy and unique one or two sentence statement will provide better results than a paragraph.
  • META Keywords Tags: These tags are where you will want to provide the meta-data information about your page. Every web site will serve a different purpose so the keywords will need to be used accordingly. “Keyword Stuffing,” the practice of using unrelated keywords, is highly discouraged and is not beneficial for your visitors or your website. Having more than 25 keywords will negatively impact the META Keywords purpose.
  • H1, H2, H3 … Tags: These tags are meant for headings and provide visual titles of your web site. It’s been proven their weight of heading words is higher than words that are not. A trick (not to be abused) is to use CSS to control how these headings are displayed. Again, since every web site is different, the usage of this technique will vary.
  • IMG … ALT text Tags: Within images it is important to describe an image. Search Engines are not human and as such need descriptions for non-human-readable objects like images. ALT attributes refers to alternative text. You want to describe your images with details for search engines to index (for their image searches). GAUDS has excellent information regarding the usage of ALT tags.
  • TITLE Attribute Tags: Similar to the ALT attribute, but this helps out your visitors and provides search engines with more information about certain objects like links, divs, headings, etc. This webmaster resource, 456 Berea St, explains the differences between ALT and TITLE attributes and provides best practices for their usage.

It’s All About the Content
A general rule of thumb is that you won’t rank high in search engines with out content. What is content? It can almost be anything from general articles, lists of information, blogs, message boards,, or even user-generated content. Content is the underpinnings of search engine optimization, it is important to make sure your content is organized so visitors and search engines will be able to efficiently navigate.

Site Maps
When you are lost in the mall, you go to the directory/map in the center to see where all the mall’s contents are right? Your web visitors are no different. It’s helpful to provide a link at the bottom to a human-readable, organized site map. A helpful method to help search engines index your web site is the use of a Site Map. Site Maps (in XML form) will be the guiding light for webmasters to control their content’s indexing.

URL Structure, Mod Rewrite, Content Management
Having a long URL like www.companyxyz.com/page.asp?aid=4&uid=32&ref=g (Server Query) do not help visitors find your website at all! Make sure you are doing everything you can to keep URLs straight forward and to the point. URLs like www.companyxyz.com/articles/search-engine-optimization will be clear for crawlers and humans to understand. Using tools like Apache’s Mod_Rewrite in addition to modern content management systems (CMS) will help you gain visitors and will help you rank higher in search engines. Wikipedia has an extensive article about this.

Targeted, Legitimate ‘Backlinks’
One of the major components to SEO and increased traffic; is to have a set of back links linking to your web site. Back Links are a search engine’s way of obtaining your authority, trustworthiness, and overall ranking. Having a targeted set of websites linking to you, will increase your ranking. Participating on message boards, forums, blogs, social networks with your web site will also help get it noticed. “Free For All” (FFAs) link exchanges will give your web site a penalty. You want to slowly obtain an army of back links, not a million back links overnight, Google will issue a penalty for this behavior. Be good, don’t spam, and earn that PageRank.

Free Search Engine SEO Tools