Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101

synoppsys: You can improve visitation to your site by applying simple and free SEO techniques.

SEO involves using tools and techniques to increase the likelihood that the pages of your site will be “crawled” by search engine “robots” (specialized software) and given a higher “page rank” than your competitors. We’ll focus on Google here, since roughly 50% of searches are performed at Google (or other sites who use the same algorithms).

Why is it important to optimize your site for Google? Because a lot of traffic through your site will come from keyword searches through Google.

SEO takes experimentation (Google’s algorithms are top secret) and patience (you might not see results for months). It is a complicated subject (you can buy 300 page books on the subject)–it is a little bit of science and a little bit of an art form.

First, let’s dispel a common assumption. Google pretty much ignores meta data tags on your pages. Those are tags at the top of your html pages that look like this: <meta name=”keywords” content=”OSU, Ohio State, Ohio State University, The Ohio State University, Big 10, Buckeyes, College, University, Scarlet and Gray, Ohio”>

Even though we really aren’t sure how Google’s algorithms work, we know a lot of the factors that they consider important. Here are 10 easy and free (“organic”) SEO tips. We’ll describe these in future posts in the context of our Africa Network case study.

1. Sprinkle targetted keywords throughout the content of your pages in key places, such as at the beginning of paragraphs and in headlines. Try bolding or italicizing those words, and write good content! (Keyword analysis is a topic in and of itself.)
2. Create 40-60 word descriptive page titles, preferably with targetted keywords, on every page of your site. Make sure the title reflect the content of the page.
3. Make sure you’re not disallowing robots from indexing your site.
4. Make it easier for the robots: submit a site map to Google to help guide indexing. Then check to see if you are you using excessive amounts of Flash, JavaScript, dynamically generated pages, frames, and embedded content in graphics, rather than straight HTML? Also, provide alternative text based links for navigation: you’ll often see these at the bottom of pages.
5. A lot of searchers will NOT land on your home page. Make sure your most common entry points into the site (“landing pages”) are getting indexed. Maybe they aren’t, because you have so many pages on your site. Google also tends to downgrade pages at lower levels in your directory structure.
6. Make sure your links are descriptive and contain keywords. Avoid the “click here”, “more…” links.
7. Try to get more web sites to link to your site (inbound linking). That demonstrates that your site is worthwhile.
8. Use keywords in your ALT tags for images.
9. Use descriptive file names for non-HTML documents such as pdfs and docs. Better yet, can you move the content of those documents into plain old HTML text?
10. Review the snippets that get displayed in a search result. Make sure the content around your first mention of a keyword is descriptive of your site, and try to get that first mention to the beginning of the HTML on the page.

(Notice a theme here: CONTENT matters.)

Now start TRACKING. Use your metrics to find out if these techniques are really impacting your number of visitors and start tweaking to make further improvements. Read books for more advanced techniques, and if you’re running an e-commerce site, look into PPC (Pay Per Click).

A word about SEM (Search Engine Marketing). SEM and SEO are often used interchangably. However, SEM is more based on traditional marketing concepts, such as conversions, persuasion, and the sales funnel.

References: Search Engine Optimization–An Hour A Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin, Search Engine Optimizations for Dummies by Peter Kent.