We often are asked by clients about search engine optimization. More specifically they usually state they want to be on the first page of Google. Don’t we all? After I take a deep breath I try to explain there are good ways and bad ways to get search engine rankings. If an SEO company is trying to sell them position on a search engine, I’m immediately confident it’s either a scam or a company that uses dubious means of achieving goals; goals that often will get a website blacklisted and cause them to completely disappear from search engine rankings.
Search engine optimization in basic terms is pretty simple. There are simple steps every web designer and web builder should take when designing and building a website.
Page Title: This is the <title> tag that displays in the title bar of a browser window. The title should be a basic description of the page content with keywords that are relavant to the content of the page. These keywords should be the most important terms relative to the page.
Page Filenames: Here is where search engines often tie some importance of the filename of the page to the content. That’s one of the reason for permalinks on blogs. The page filename should contain the strongest keyword of the title of the page. Names like my_dog_kayla.html actually lend some weight to keyword importance on the page
Meta Data: Keywords and description in the meta data is less important than it used to be – but it should not be discounted. The description should be a simple one or two sentances that summarize what the content of the page represents. The keywords on the page should match up with those defined on the page with the title, header tags and bold tags.
Alt Tags: Always use alt tags on images. Search engines cannot read text in images, nor can they determine what an image represents. The alt tag is intended for browsers or readers that are unable to display or view images. This is helpful for vision impaired readers too.
Title Tags: These are often confused with alt tags. The title tag should be used to add text inside of links, not repeat it. Title should be more descriptive than the link text it represents. This shouldn’t be a paragraph, just a simple description.
Header Tags: These are used by search engines to determine the importance of words. Instead of using CSS style classes to create headings on text, use the header tags (h1,h2 etc) and simply redefine them in CSS.
Bold Tags: Bold tags are used to make keywords stand out in sentences or in places where a block level tag (such as header tags) are not appropirate for the layout of the page.
Probably one of the most important aspects of good search engine ranking is quality content. A good content page shouldn’t consist of dozens of links, images, or specialized layout. Search engines are looking for text to search and index. The content should be representative of the title, keywords, headings and all combined.
I cannot say enough about quality incoming links. These are external websites that point to your site, or pages on your site. This should be QUALITY links. Link farms do not count and aren’t recommended.
In summary, search engine optimization is really about common sense and remembering that search engine spiders are trying to make sense of the content on your pages. Try to use the simplest and most obvious techniques to help the search engine spider do it’s job.