SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

GETTING LISTED IN GOOGLE

I am not a professional search engine optimiser, everything here is based on trial & error along with some great tips from the Cre8asite Forum. SEO is a very complex task so I will only concentrate on one aspect, getting listed high up in Google. Getting listed at all in Google is easy, you don’t even need to submit your site, all you need is at least one link to your site from a site that listed and the Google spider will pick it up within a few days.

Ever wondered why your pages don’t get ranked as highly as others in a Google search? Probably the most important thing to understand is the way Search Engines work: if someone wants to find something they typically type one or more keywords into the search engine and off it goes looking for those words. This is not just a matter of filling in the keyword meta tag (most search engines these days ignore this unless the words really are used in the text) or repeating the words over and over again (your pages will actually get penalised for this). There are many factors involved, search engines now use very complex algorithms to determine whether a site should be near the top of the list or down the bottom. The following is just a very basic guide, SEO is a highly sophisticated and skilled job, major companies invest thousands in SEO.

Keywords

Try to think what your target audience would search for, and whether they would seach for your name or the product/service you have to offer. There are two different types of search: (A) a search for a specific name and (B) a search for a specific product or service. If someone is looking for a specific company, such as Microsoft, then that is what they will type in and that is what they will find. That's all very well for well known companies, but supposing you are a smaller company with many competitors and you need to get across to a public that may not have heard of you.

Let’s take a fictitious company that makes jewellery from amber with insects inside. The company is called Ambafax and their URL is ambafax.com. They have submitted their site to the main search engines and directories, and are very pleased that when you type ambafax into Google, hey presto, their site is listed first. Actually it's the only site as Ambafax is such a unique word, so only your friends and family will be searching. Not good for business. The problem is that nobody has (yet) heard of Ambafax and people interested in finding this type of product are searching with the words amber, jewellery and insects. These then would be good keywords to optimise the page for. Amber and jewellery by themselves will work, but there will be a lot more competition than if more specific words (insects) are used, so it is worthwhile spending some time thinking about which words to use along with the obvious ones. Search engines look through the text of a page trying to match the words it finds there with those entered by the searcher.

A Keyphrase Per Page

You need to include key phrases in the text, but too many different phrases for one page will dilute the importance of each. Keyphrases are also given importance if in the page name, page title, <h1> header, anchor text of links to that page and also in text close to the top of the page. If you have a lot of phrases, try spreading them over several categorised pages of your site, so instead of Jurassic amber jewellery with insects, Triassic amber jewellery with insects, etc in the first paragraph (NB words closer to the top of the text on a page are generally given more importance), it would make sense to have a page for Jurassic and a page for Triassic. It seems that Google gives a lot of importance to the name of the page and the H1 header, so including your key phrase in these will be a very good starting point. Some search engines also look at the meta description tag. Google now finds a word within a word, so you can run the words together in the name, eg it will find the two words in triassicamber.html, but some other search engines may not, so it is safer to have triassic-amber.html or triassic/amber.html.

The order of the words also has some importance.

Links

Google has a system called Pagerank (PR) which gives each page a score out of 10 based on how it views the importance of that page. You can use the Internet Explorer Google Toolbar to check this (PC only), or if you are a Mac user you can check it with the some of these SEO tools. A large factor involved in getting a good PR is having plenty of links from other sites back to your site (backlinks), this can be done by submitting your site to important directories or simply asking for links (often this is easiest if you reciprocate links, however lots of outward links from your page may reduce the PR). Links from higher ranking pages will give your pages better PR.

Ideally the pages should link with text that includes keywords, ie your keywords or phrases are in the anchor text (ie the text between the <a href=xxx.htm> and the </a>). It’s possible for a page to show up even if the search terms are not on that page, but are in the anchor text of links to that page. Just for fun, see what happens when you type the words miserable & failure into google. Look here to get an explanation

Note that this page has been optimised for the phrase Search Engine Optimisation, however even with the English spelling of Optimisation with an s not the American z, this is unlikely to be able to compete with the many thousands of dedicated professional SEO sites with high PR. This one little amateur page will probably not get many backlinks from important pages and so does not stand a very good chance among all that competition, who will also have optimised for the English spelling.

Other pages on this site have been optimised for search phrases that do get very high listings in Google, e.g. saxophone tutorials and blues saxophone

DO Submit your site to the major directories (eg: Open Directory, Yahoo, Bluefind, Zeal) Use keywords or phrases in the alt attribute of an image, especially if the image is a link Get key words and phrases into headers, especially <h1> headers at the top of the page. These are seen as important places for keywords Get key words and phrases into page titles and description meta tags. Note that keyword meta tags are no longer relevant to some search engines. Make the titles relevant to the text in each page Get key words and phrases into the URL. This is not always possible but can be very useful Get key words and phrases into anchor text of links to your pages Try to make sure your HTML code is correct and as uncluttered as possible. All the garbage that Microsoft Word adds when converting to HTML is very unfriendly for a search engine Try to get as many pages linking to your site as possible Link each page of your site back to the home page Provide alternative spellings or frequent mispellings in your text. So what if you get lots of dyslexic customers?

DON’T Overstuff the text with keywords or phrases, it will put your customers off. Words repeated over and over are considered spamming by search engines and you may get penalised for this. Making repeated words invisible will also be considered spamming. Use one page with lots and lots of text if you can create several pages, each optimised for certian words or phrases Use mirror sites or doorway pages to try to boost traffic to your site. This can be penalised. Even if the search engine itself does not pick it up, your competeors may report you and you could then be penalised Duplicate large chunks of text on other pages, search engines will see this as a trick and ignore all but one page. You should try to find ways of saying things differently, even if you are saying the same thing Use graphic images or Flash to replace important text. Google is beginning to be able to pick up text from Flash, but not very well yet. Unfortunately good design and SEO do not always go hand in hand Use Flash or Java navigation menus unless you also include an HTML menu or sitemap, search engines cannot follow Flash links and often cannot follow Javascript links when crawling your site to find words Use framesets if you can avoid it. The index page of a frameset contains no useful text at all unless you include it in a noframes tag