The techniques website developers and marketers use to promote their web sites are many and varied. Promotions on the web are not so different from promotions in any other medium – you need to use any and all channels available to you for getting the word out. What used to be known as guerrilla marketing is now the norm online.
If a tree falls in the woods…
If your site doesn’t show up in the first page of Google results, does it really exist? In some cases, getting your site listed near the top of a search for a particular word, or phrase, is imperative to the success of your web site and/or your business. Hence the interest marketers have in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The search engines have a monopoly. Many users will not bother to look at sites that are not listed on the first page of search results for a particular term. Many will not even bother with sites that are not in the top 3 results.
An excellent introduction
This site has an excellent introduction to the concept of Search Engine Optimization. I will highlight what I consider to be the key aspects of the information in that tutorial.
SEO is “politics by other means”
How you place in the search results depends in a large part upon how the search engines work. Each has a set of secret algorithms that ultimately determine how far up your site falls in the search results for any search term. However, each search engine also regularly modifies these algorithms. So just because you are high up in the search results today doesn’t mean that you will be there tomorrow. Large, well-funded sites will try to detect each change in the search engines’ algorithms, and will modify their own sites accordingly.
“Politics by other means” was how General von Clausewitz described war. You should generally consider SEO to be akin to war, and should think strategically. Given the huge number of websites on just about any topic, all vying for the attention of a finite group of potential viewers, how will your site get noticed? Everyone in the game is battling to show up at the top of a search result for the relevant keywords, so your chances of winning any particular battle are slim.
You need to consider SEO a sustained campaign of attrition. Unless your site is very niche-oriented, and involves very obscure keywords, a one-time shock-and-awe marketing strategy may work for you at first, but you will slowly slide down in the search results as the search algorithms evolve, and as the other players in the game indefatiguably try to climb up to the top, pushing you down along the way.
It’s all about semantics
At a high level, the key to SEO is to make what your site is about clear to the search engines. If your site is about cars, but you don’t use the word “car” in any headings or titles of pages, you will not be making a search engine’s job easy.
The search engines should be able to discover the main themes of your site automatically by crawling through the code of your site, seeing what other sites link to your site, seeing where your site links, and detecting the main words you use for things like the titles of pages, headings, and the text used in links.
So here are some very general but easy-to-implement tips:
- inbound links: make partnerships, or friendships, with other sites and get them to link to your site. You can even buy them. The more thematically related the linking site is to your site, the better. And ask them nicely to make the copy in the link text meaningful in some way to the content of your site.
- outbound links: don’t be afraid to link to other related sites. You want to show the search engines that you are part of the community of sites related to a specific topic.
- picking keywords: if your site is about animals, you will need to come up with alternative keywords to use. There are so many sites about animals that you will never make it to the top of the search results by optimizing for the word, “animals”. Find variations or more specific keywords to use instead.
- keyword density: if your site is about porpoise feeding habits, be sure to use the phrase “porpose feeding habits” in as many places in your content as possible.
- meaningful page titles: If your site is about mold colonies, put the words “mold colonies”, or related words, in the <title> tag of every page
- meaningful page headings: Make sure to use the word “cultural perspectives on aging”, or related keywords and phrases in the <h1> – <h6> tags on your pages, if your site is about the cultural perspectives of the aging process.
- meaningful link copy: If your page about the health benefits of flax seed oil links to a page about bio-diesel car engines, put the words “flax seed oil will make your bio-diesel engine run quicker” somewhere in the link copy. Of course, I’m being facetious, but you need to find creative ways to throw in the major keywords anywhere possible, even in the text you use for links.
- semantic tags: use XHTML tags for what they were meant to be used for – don’t try to game the system (for now). Use <h1> – <h6> tags for things that are truly headings of the content of your pages. Use <p> tags for paragraphs, <th> tags for table headings, surround important words with the <strong> tag, use <label> tags for labels, etc.
- don’t bury the content: use as few XHTML tags as possible to get the job done. If you wrap <h1> tags within <divs> within <divs> within <divs> within <divs>, the search engine spider may give up trying to get to the real content of your page as it drills down through all the levels of your code. Of course, efficient use of XHTML and CSS code comes with practice.
- use meaningful URLs: if you feel comfortable with mod_rewrite and .htaccess files, convert your URLs to be semantically meaningful. For example, a page about artichoke recipes that has a URL like http://onepotcooking.com/recipes/artichokes is much more search engine friendly than http://onepotcooking.com/spring2009/class12/assigment6/recipes.php?cat=12
- use <meta> tags in the <head> section of your document to explicitly include a description and keywords of your site. Most search engines will actually ignore these when indexing your site, but it doesn’t hurt.
As you can see, there are some very practical things you can do to make your site more likely to be noticed by search engines. How much you sacrifice in terms of design and creativity in order to appease the search engine gods is up to you and your specific needs.
More information
There are dozens of books available about this topic, and any of them will go into more detail about exactly what the differences are between the different search engines. But each of them will most likely be focused at a high level on these fundamental concepts.
Furthermore, a simple search with the keywords, “search engine optimization” will bring up thousands of pages, blogs, message boards, and sites devoted to the topic. Feel free to pick one from the top of the list.