Welcome
Articles are organised by date. Typically, there will be a new one as and when I have the time and find a subject to talk about.
- What is SEO?
- Why is SEO important, and who is it important for?
- Keeping the right company (avoiding unscrupulous methods)
- Identifying your target audience
- Creating your content
- Spring Cleaning (sorting out page code)
- Making friends (linking)
- Finishing touches
- Your new baby (SEO upkeep)
SEO Upkeep
Contents
What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation) is the art of bringing your websites as close as possible to the top results for a natural web search. The best way to explain a natural web search is by means of an example. Imagine you had an on-line fish shop (not the seaside variety!), where people could buy fish, and other accessories, and it was called ACME Fish Co. A customer is unlikely to search for your company name, because if they already knew this, they would probably know your website address. They might search for something like "clown fish" or "anemone". To make it a pure natural search, your website should not rely on paid-for advertising on search results to get to the top.
Although paid-for advertising is not a taboo, and should often be encouraged for campaigns, it is not the preferred way to get your website noticed. It is not unknown for reputable web companies to offer this as the only means of SEO, which, as well as having a particularly negative effect on ones purse strings, it also only allows you to capture searches which you have anticipated.
Why is SEO important, and who is it important for?
If you don't care whether or not you are found on-line, then SEO is not for you. This is not as an unusual statement as it sounds. Often, a business or individual may want their website to be used as an on-line portfolio, to be seen only by people who are given the web address.
If you are an on-line business, or you rely on customers finding your website, either to purchase on-line or get in touch with you, then SEO is an absolute necessity.
Keeping the right company
For those of you who might not be as "up" on the technology as some, the idea of having your website come at #1 spot on a search result is too great an offer to pass up. Unfortunately, as the saying goes "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" is all too correct here. Just look on the SEO guides of all the great search engines, and each of them will tell you that this claim is just not possible, by any stretch of the imagination. The honest truth of the matter is, there is no guaranteed way of optimising a website for any search engine, not even for a single term.
This is not the only technique employed by nefarious search engine optimisers, and despite what they might tell you, these methods are frowned upon by the most popular search engines, and can in some cases they negatively affect your rankings. Among these methods are doorway pages and link farms. Doorway pages generally exist in clusters, each one containing hundreds of popular keywords so that they are found by search engines, which immediately redirect you to another website. Link farms are sites which contain hundreds of links to other websites in an attempt to boost the ranking of those websites. This does not generally work, especially for Google, as it uses the importance of web pages linking to you to determine the importance of yours. Also, not so incidentally, Google will, and has done in some cases, marked websites negatively for employing these techniques.
Identifying your target audience
The first step to optimising your website is to identify who you need to optimise it for. This might both sounds a ridiculous idea, and also an impossible one. One way is to brainstorm what you think people will use to find your website. This process is best done by more than one person, to get a properly unbiased keyword list. Another method if you already have a website, is to use visitor tracking software to look at what search terms people use to find your website currently. This can form a basis for your brainstorming.
Once you have the terms people will use, or at least those that you think people will use, you can move onto the next step.
Creating your content
Content is the single most important aspect of search engine optimisation, being for most engines more important than meta tags. In fact, Google largely ignores meta tags. To get to this step, you should have previously identified your audience, creating a keyword list. You should already have a rough idea of how important each word is in relation to the list, and this will help here. Quite simply, you ought to aim to include each word, as often as possible, in properly formed sentences. The smarter of the search engines, Google in particular, are capable of recognising properly formed sentences, and do penalize against keyword farms (pages consisting of nothing but random keywords.) This is aside from the fact that humans visiting your website (as opposed to search engine crawlers or spiders) will never visit again if there is nothing intelligible for them to return to!
How these keywords are exactly incorporated is up to you, but some recommendations are that the pages on your site change at frequent intervals. This is harder than it first appears, and it is thought by some that by adding new content to your website would prevent the need from huge updates site-wide. If your site is product-based, you could benefit from adding new products every so often, or updating existing product specifications. If your site relies on portfolio-style content, then it could benefit from new pages or paragraphs being added regularly, but this is something i will touch upon later.
Spring Cleaning
This is the next step on the road to optimisation. Very rarely does any site meet the expectations of all search engines, and in fact, it might be completely impossible to do so. This step, as well as helping with SEO, also covers some ground in the area of accessibility.
If you look at a typical page of text on-line (and this is assuming you have no visual impairments which might mean you were viewing through a text browser) then you will notice how it is split into sections, each headed by a heading. If you look at these same sites in a text or Braille browser, you might notice something entirely different. Most of the time, what is easily visible to you and me as a heading, is actually nothing more than stylized text, made slightly larger, and rendered as bold. The problem is, websites are often designed on a visual aspect, and semantic meaning is lost. Search engines prioritize heading text over regular text, going as far as prioritizing according to the level of heading (of which there are 6 in the HTML language.)
As well as headings, image text is another key factor. This also covers areas of accessibility, but is key to new age search engines also, especially those like MSN Search and Google search, which include image searches as part of their regular search (as well as offering dedicated image searches.)
The last main code factor is with regards to link contents. It's an extreme faux pas to use the words "click here" as the clickable area of the link. Google recommends that the text of the link (or image text should you use that as you link content) should be understandable if taken out of context. If you are linking to a website, you should use the web address as the link content, if linking to a page, you should use the name of the page as the link content. Obviously, this could be a never-ending list, so you ought to use your own judgement in this. One way to test this is to make a list of all your links, without the surrounding content. Can you understand what a link is just by looking at the text? If not, you should look to address this, as it could impact heavily on your search position.
Making Friends
By now you should have realized to avoid bad company, but you might not necessarily know who you should befriend. Quite simply, anybody who you shouldn't avoid, you can make your friend. As Google is the most popular search engine, it is easiest to use it as an example. Google never negatively impacts your own website ranking based on what other sites link to you, based purely on the simple fact that you have no control over whoever links to you. However, having "good" sites links to you, can considerably improve you rating, as the ranking of the site linking to you directly affects your own. The more mathematical among you may notice this situation should result in a circular reference situation, but don't ask me to explain it, as Google guards jealously this particular secret!
If you are a business, look to business networking websites, and those business that have similar (but not conflicting) interests to your own. Personal websites would probably benefit more from personal networking websites (and some of the business networking sites will also fall into this category, so you should not discount them too readily).
Finishing touches
If you've followed all the above steps with regards to SEO, then you need only follow one more, and this is only to ensure maximum optimisation with Google. Now Google, being the greatest innovators of their field, have developed an XML sitemap specification, that they use to help them search your website. As this has no negative impact on any other SEO technique, it is a worthwhile technique to employ. The XML file itself consists of an entry for each page, marking the priority each page has (relative to the other pages in the same site) and the update frequency of the page.
For full details on how to create an XML sitemap, see https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html.
Your new baby
Of course, SEO does not stop now. In fact, it should never stop, so long as you have a need for it. Not only do search engines change their algorithms, but your own needs will also changes. Nothing should remain static, in fact your website will always benefit from new content.
If your website is an e-commerce solution, it would benefit from special offers, changed on a regular basis. Not only will search engines recognize the new content, but you will keep customers enticed by the new offers.
Other types of websites will benefit from changes also, but they need not be as regular or frequent. Often, just adding some content every month or so is enough. Blogs can be particularly efficient for this purpose, as they can be easily updated.
Hopefully, this has been enlightening for you. It is nice to think that all of you who read this are able to take something from it. If you have any comments to make about this article, please feel free to contact me and let me know.
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