Search Engine Optimization
by Vivian Lund
“Ha, ha”, you say, as you are reading this. “This website has AWFUL search engine placement in a Google search for ‘website design’! What can she possibly know about search engine optimization?”
Well, you learn from your mistakes. And I certainly have learned a lot….
There are three fundamental aspects of search engine optimization:
1) The design of your website itself.
2) The listing of your website in various directories and on various search engines.
3) The links to your website from other relevant websites.
I will discuss each of these aspects in detail, starting with the design of your website.
Website Design for Good Search Engine Placement
There are reams of documents out there discussing the elements of a good website design, but it is amazing to me how few websites actually implement these design guidelines. It is well worth taking the time to include these items in your web design.
1) Good Content: “What do you mean, ‘Good content’? Of course my website has good content.” Well, does it really? If your website is a commercial website, as opposed to an informational website, do you have sections of your site devoted to explaining some aspect of the products you sell? Do you offer something helpful to the prospective customer besides a shopping cart? This is an excellent way to improve the usefulness of your website to others, and increase the scope of your website as far as search engines are concerned.
2) Meta Tags – Description, Keyword : The “keyword” meta tag may not be used by many search engines anymore, but it can’t hurt to include it. Just make sure your keywords are relevant, and don’t repeat words excessively. (Yes, I have seen websites that have the word “sex” in the keyword meta tag that have nothing to do with sex. Would you want do business with someone who tries underhanded tricks like this on their website?) The “description” meta tag is used by some search engines to describe your site. Try to keep it short and succinct.
3) Alt Tags for images: Search engine robots cannot read your images. You must use the alt tags to describe the text on the images for the spiders.
4) Text Links for hyperlinks: Make sure that hyperlinks to pages within your site using images with text on them are also included on your pages in text only form somewhere, usually at the bottom. For an example, look at the bottom of this page.
5) Title for each page: Try to use a different title for each page, starting with your website name, and then a description of the page.
6) Include keywords in page text: Include text on each page of your site that has relevant keywords. Don’t go overboard, and don’t put something in strictly for the sake of search engine robots, however. Also, images are pretty, but robots can’t see them.
7) Links page: You will need a page to trade links with other relevant websites.
8 ) Sitemap: Search engine robots love sitemaps. Humans might not find them as useful, but for the sake of the robots, you should have one. A sitemap will include all the pages in your website that you would like indexed by the search engines.
9) Proper HTML: Use proper hypertext markup, since that’s all the robots understand.
10) Proper page hierarchy: Try to design your website with a logical hierarchy that is no more than 3 or 4 layers deep. It is best if you can get to each page in the site from every other page, but if this is not possible, make sure each page in your site has some other page linking to it in text form.
11) Robots.txt file: This is a file which you include in the root of your website’s domain which tells search engine robots which pages to spider and which to ignore, when to revisit, and other useful robot directives. Search engines really appreciate robots.txt files, as it helps them speed their web spidering. To learn how to create this file, click here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html
Listing Your Website on Various Search Engines and Directories for Good Search Engine Placement
So now you have your website optimized, and it just went live. What next? Well, your next step should be to submit its URL to the major search engines. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Exactseek, and AltaVista, and many other search engines allow you to submit your URL, but make sure that you only submit it one time to each engine, and allow at least 4 weeks for your site to show up. To check for your website on a given search engine, type “www.your_domain_name.com” in the search box. If it comes up in the listing, you know that search engine has “spidered” your site and you are now listed.
The next step is to submit your website to DMOZ.com, the open directory project. “DMOZ” stands for “Directory Mozilla” [1]. Google has partnered with DMOZ.com, and this gives an indication of the high regard which Google has for the open directory project. Google uses the open directory’s database for the Google Directory, and so do many, many other directory-type websites. This is a great way to get your site listed in a relevant category of your choosing. Once again, it takes as long as 4 weeks to get listed on dmoz.com after you submit your site.
Next, if your site’s rank on Google is important to you, you will need to learn how “important” your website is to Google. To do this, you must download and install the Google Toolbar. The Google Toolbar is a neat little addition to your web browser, allowing you to “search the web with Google from any site, eliminate pop-up ads, fill in forms with one click, [and] highlight search terms on a page.”[2] But the most important feature of the Google Toolbar is a little bar graph called “PageRank”. This graph shows you the relative importance of any page on your website on a scale of zero to ten. How does Google come up with the page rank, you ask? Well, they are not going to tell you exactly, but they do allude to some of the logic behind the operation of the PageRank algorithm here.
Basically, the PageRank system looks at the “importance” of the pages that link to your website, and creates a page rank for your page based on the relevance of those links to your site. How do they determine the “importance” of the pages that link to you? You guessed it: “importance” is determined by how many relevant “important” pages link to those other pages that, in turn, link to you. Confused? I hope not. It all boils down to getting other relevant “important” websites to link to your website. Even if a website is not considered very “important” by Google’s standards, it may become more important in the future, and any relevant link is a good link. Which leads us to our next topic, namely, how to get other websites to link to your site.
Links from Other Websites for Good Search Engine Placement
There are lots of strategies for getting other websites to link to yours. Some of them might not be advisable, however. Here is a quote from Google’s website: “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.” Google is trying to tell you that if you include your site in a “link farm”, or a web of websites that are all interlinked and have no relevance to each other at all, you will be penalized for this.
So what is a good strategy? You can start by finding out who links to your competitors. How do you do this? Type your favorite keywords in your favorite search engine. See which sites are highly ranked. Now, using alltheweb.com, or google.com, or a whole host of other search engines, type in “link:www.your_competitor’s_site.com” (without the quotes and with your competitor’s site name). You may also try msn.com, but in this case you have to type “linkdomain:www.highly_ranked_site.com”.
According to several webmaster forums, Google’s results for the ‘link:” query purportedly only include pages with a Google PageRank of 4/10 or greater, and will not even return results for some pages.
Google’s supposed answer to this inconsistency in their search is as follows:
“This ‘link:’ search, however, may not return a comprehensive set of results. The results show a sample of the links that point to a page, but this list is in no way indicative of the link structure utilized by Google to formulate a page’s PageRank. To obtain a comprehensive list of the links that point to a page, perform a Google search on your URL. From the result page displayed, select the ‘Find the web pages that contain the term’ link and Google will provide you with the web pages that mention the address.” [3]
In my experience with any type of Google link search, I don’t find all the pages that I know link to a given site. MSN.com’s “linkdomain:” and AlltheWeb’s ‘link:’ search results are much more inclusive than Google’s. Use whichever search engine gives you the best results.
Now you see which websites link to your keyword competitors’ sites. Are any of them relevant to your site as well? If so, put a link to these sites on your website’s link page. Next, send an email to the owner of the prospective website telling them that you are linking to them, and also indicate that you will remove the link if they do not want it. Then politely ask if they would consider adding a link to your website, and give them the URL to which you wish them to link.
Google supposedly does not consider links into your site on other, irrelevant websites as spam, since you have no control over them. However, Google does consider pages of hundreds of unrelated links as spam, and if you have this type of link page in your site, you are doing no one any good and perhaps harming yourself in the process.
My Site Just Got Listed on Google! And It’s Highly Ranked! Now I Can Sit Back and Wait for the Phone to Ring!!!!
NOT SO FAST!!! Google loves new content.[4] Your site may enjoy a high ranking for several months, only to disappear completely from a given keyword search because Google no longer considers your pages as “fresh content”. Your job is to make sure this does not happen. You must continue to update your site with useful content, and you must continue to work to insure that other, high-quality, relevant websites link to your site.
Advertising your site will not help your keyword rankings, according to Google, but it certainly won’t hurt them, either. There are many ways to advertise your site without having a huge advertising budget. You can experiment with several and keep using those that work for you. Here are several cost-effective ways to advertise your site.
1) You might consider paying to have your website included in the Yahoo! Directory. The cost is $299/yr for commercial websites, free for non-commercial sites.
2) Google adwords is an excellent way to get an ad for your site using the keywords of your choice. You decide how much you want to “pay-per-click”, and this determines how prominent or how high up on the page your ad is placed.
3) Overture has partnered with many of the the other larger search engines for its pay-per-click advertising service.
4) Inktomi offers a pay-per-inclusion service for several of the larger search engines. Pay-for-inclusion differs from pay-per-click in that your website shows up as part of the search results, not in a separate advertising area on the search results page.
5) Looksmart’s pay-per-click ads will get your site listed in the Zeal.com directory.
Good Luck!
Vivian Lund
Electric-Webs.com web site design
[1]Mozilla is the “original name for the Netscape Navigator browser, which is supposedly a hybrid of the words ‘Mosaic’ and ‘Godzilla.’ Web lore has it that Mozilla means ‘the beast (Godzilla) that ate Mozaic (the browser).’ ” http://www.google.com/search?q=define:Mozilla
[2] http://toolbar.google.com/
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