Search Engine Optimization

Web page design tips
Home page

What is SEO?

The Web contains tens of millions of pages, and the chance that someone will find your web site by chance is next to zero. The majority of Web surfers rely on the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista, to find sites relevant to their interest. Whether they are shopping for fishing gear, looking for information on 17th century French history, or trying to find a recipe, people are likely to turn to a search engine to find related sites. The bottom line is that if you want to draw more traffic to your Web site, you need a presence on the search engines.

Almost all of the search engines create their listings by using automated software. These programs are called spiders because they "crawl" the Web looking for information. They are sometimes referred to as robots as well. These programs travel from page to page using the hyperlinks that form the "strands" of the World Wide Web. The content of each page is analyzed to determine the placement of the page in the search engine's listings. The goal of a webmaster is to get his or her pages listed in the proper categories and ideally to achieve a listing position near the top of the list where it will be seen by more people. SEO is nothing more than the art of authoring your Web pages so their content is accessible to the spiders in the most effective manner.

How Pages are Ranked by the Search Engines

I wish I could answer this question but the techniques used by the search engines to rank pages are a closely held secret. A top listing on a major search engine is highly desirable because it can mean a huge increase in traffic to your website. If the techniques used by Google or the other search engines to rank pages were publicly known, everyone would start designing their pages specifically to meet these criteria. Of course the search engines want their rankings to be meaningful so that the pages they rank the highest are those that are most useful to surfers. They do not want unscrupulous "SEO experts" to be able to use tricks and deception to give a Web page a high but undeserved ranking.

That being said, there are still techniques that you can use to improve your chances of getting a good ranking on the search engines. These techniques are not tricks, but are simply ways to make the content of your pages maximally accessible to the spiders. That's what this page is primarily about (spiders - pay attention now!).

Page Optimization Techniques

This section explains a variety of page authoring techniques that can maximize your exposure to the search engine spiders.

One Topic at a Time

Many Web sites deal with multiple topics. Even so, it is advisable to design the site structure so that each topic gets it own page. Perhaps your hobbies are restoring old cars and playing the guitar. If you put them together on one Web page the spiders may not be sure where to put the listing - under guitars or cars? Maybe your online shop sells collectible coins and computer software - again, make it two sites so each one appears as an integrated entity to the engines. Of course you will often want to have a home page that provides links to all the individual pages on the site. Then be sure that each individual topic page includes a link back to the home page. You may also want each page to include links to other topic pages.

Your Keyword Strategy

Keywords are perhaps the most important part of your SEO strategy. I am not talking about specific words and phrases that are marked as being keywords, although those play a role too (as I will discuss soon). Rather I am talking about words and phrases that are part of the page content and accurately identify the content of the page. Search engines look through the entire content of the page, and the more often a keyword occurs the more weight it will be given. Other things being equal, a page that mentions the word "chicken" 20 times will be ranked higher in the Chicken category on the search engine listings than a page that mentions it just once.

For each page you should decide on a word or phrase that will be the keyword for that page. It can be a good idea to do some searching yourself for pages on the same or similar topics. See which keywords, when entered as search terms in the major search engines, pull up pages that are closely related to yours - these keywords (and of course I mean short phrases as well as individual words) are good candidates for your page. If a likely sounding keyword does not do well at pulling up closely related pages, then it is not a good candidate.

As you might expect, common words such as the and with are ignored by the spiders. It's better to create key phrases that do not contain such words. For example, Visual Basic Programming is better than  Programming with Visual Basic.

The Page Title

The page title, enclosed in <title>...</title> tags in the <head> section of the document, is an important part of your SEO strategy. It should provide a concise and accurate description of the page contents and ideally will include your primary keyword. Remember, the page title is displayed in the browser's title bar and is also the first thing that is displayed in a search engine listing for a page. Assuming that potential visitors even find your page in the search listings, it is your title that will tempt them to click your link and not another link.

The Text

The text on your page is extremely important for the search engines. After all, along with the images it is your page content, and that's what the search spiders are most interested in. As you create your page text your goal should be to create keyword-rich content while at the same time keeping readable and not artificial-seeming. There can be a real art to this, and there are no fixed techniques to follow. It will help to look at an example. Suppose you are creating a site to sell Acme Flower Scissors and have decided that your keyword will be, quite reasonably, Acme Flower Scissors. Here's a first try at a paragraph of text for the page:

I discovered Acme Flower Scissors last year while on a trip to England, where they are made. I thought they were by far the best kind I had ever used. These scissors are really sharp and fit your hand beautifully so it is not tiring to use them. They are made of surgical stainless steel and with proper care will never rust or wear out. At $29.95 they are not cheap but will be the last pair you ever need to buy.

 Now here is the same text after review and modification by someone who is familiar with SEO techniques:

Acme Flower Scissors are made in England, and I discovered them last year while on vacation. I thought the Acme scissors were by far the best kind I had ever used. The Acme Flower Scissors are really sharp and fit your hand beautifully so it is not tiring to use them. Acme Scissors are made of surgical stainless steel and with proper care will never rust or wear out. At $29.95 Acme Flower Scissors are not cheap but will be the last pair you ever need to buy.

I think that the difference is clear. The first paragraph mentions the keyword only once, while the second version mentions it (or a variant of it) five times. Not only that, in the second version the keyword is the very first thing in the paragraph - something else that search engines may pay attention to!

Don't Fake It

Since search engines pay attention to keyword frequency, why not just include the keyword dozens or hundreds of times in a way that is not visible to the page visitor but can be read by the spiders? One technique that is used is to put the repeated keyword in an HTML comment. Another is to include it as invisible text, such as white letters on a white background. Nice try, but the search engines have caught onto this technique and are quite good at distinguishing legitimate occurrences of a keyword from deliberate attempts to deceive. In fact, attempts at keyword loading will usually result in a lower ranking in the search engine listings or even outright exclusion.

Using alt Attributes

Each <img> can include the optional alt attribute that specifies text to be displayed in the event the image cannot be found. These tags offer another avenue for the page author to include information that is relevant for the search engines. The spiders cannot look at your image to categorize the content, but they can read your alt tags. Make a habit of always including a short, accurate description in each image's alt tag. An added bonus is that this makes the page more accessible to vision-impaired people who may use a text-to-speech browser that "displays" images by reading the content of the alt attribute.

Another way to use the alt attribute is when your page includes images that do not have any content but are used simply as graphical elements, such as this blue line that I use as a separator on some of my pages.

Why let the alt attribute go to waste? Include some information that helps the search engine identify and classify the page. For example, here's the full tag for the bar above:

<img border="0" src="IMAGES/BLUEBAR.GIF" alt="search engine optimization" width="540" height="4">

Don't overdo it. If your page contains a dozen blue bars, don't use the same alt attribute for each.

Use of Meta Tags

A web page can include one or more meta tags in the <head> section. Meta tags are used to include a wide variety of information in the page. The general form they take is as follows:

<meta name="name of tag" content="content of tag" />

A meta tag has no effect on anything unless some software is specifically looking for it. There are two that are relevant for the search engines, keywords and description. To be honest, there is some debate about the extent to which the search engines really use the contents of these meta tags, but I believe that they should be included. At worst they will be ignored.

The keyword meta tag lets you include a comma-delimited list of keywords for the page. Your primary keyword should be included as the first in the list, followed by a small selection of secondary keywords. Again it is important to select keywords that are really relevant to your page and not to include keywords that are at best peripherally relevant just in the hopes of attracting a few more visitors. Here's an example of a keywords meta tag:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" />

The description meta tag is designed to provide a longer description of the page. Sometimes a search engine will display your description, or at least the first line or two, in its listings. Here's an example of a description meta tag. This one is taken from my Visual Basic programming page (chick here if you are interested):

<meta name="description"
content="Tips and information on Visual Basic 6 programming. Expert strategies for programmers in graphics, database, internet, user interface design, optimization, controls, and ActiveX">

Page Design Considerations for SEO

The content of your pages, as well as the judicious use of various HTML tags, is an essential part of any SEO strategy. Page design plays a role as well, but it's mostly a matter of knowing what to avoid. Certain page design techniques may give you a gorgeous web page at the same time they are reducing the page's availability to the search engines. Let's look at things to minimize or avoid and why.

Frames

Frames are a design technique that lets you present two or more completely independent windows on a single page. Each window contains its own "page" or HTML document. If used properly frames can be an effective design tool, but they essentially hide your content from the search engines. The reason is that the page itself - the page with the frames - does not contain any content. It contains only links to the individual pages that are to be displayed in the frames. These pages are loaded by the user's browser. This means that when a search engine spider visits your page it does not see any content. In theory a spider could be smart enough to detect frames and burrow down to load and evaluate the individual content pages, but that is not happening yet as far as I know.

Flash Animations

Flash is a program that lets you develop really impressive web page animations complete with images, navigation buttons, sound, database access, and more. It is so powerful that entire pages have been created using nothing but Flash, and they can be truly impressive. The problem from the perspective of SEO is that the contents of a Flash animation are completely invisible to the spiders, including the hyperlinks. My approach is to use Flash sometimes to create an attractive page banner or other design elements, but never to hide a page's content in a Flash animation.

PDF Files

PDF stands for Portable Document Format, a file specification developed by Adobe for creation, distribution, and printing of formatted documents. The software for viewing and printing PDF files is free and PDF has become a widely used technique for making documents available on the web. As with Flash animations, however, the content of a PDF file is invisible to the search engines. Whenever you need to use a PDF, try to make the same content available as a  standard web page also, to permit it to be indexed by the search engines.

JavaScript Navigation

You can do lots of great things with JavaScript, including navigation, but links that are within JavaScript code (for example, in fly-out menus) cannot be followed by a spider. If you want to use JavaScript for navigation within your site, it's a good idea to also include traditional HTML links for the spiders to follow.

Image Maps

An image map is an image that has been divided up into several sections with each section acting as a hyperlink to another page. You may have seen them used for geographical maps where you click the state or country of interest to go to the relevant web page. Links in an image map are not readable by a spider robot, thus preventing further indexing of your site. If you must use an image map, you should also include a more traditional set of links using HTML for the search engines to use.

External Links

Most search engines assign some weight to the number of external links a page has - in other words, how many pages on other web sites contain links to your page. The theory here is that a page that is truly useful will be linked from lots of other pages, while a page that is not so great will have fewer links to it - sort of voting by popularity if you will. It's not known which search engines use external links as a ranking factor or how exactly they go about it - again, this is closely held information - but there is general agreement among SEO practitioners that it is a factor that needs consideration. This has given rise to a variety of schemes designed to simply increase the raw link count for a page. Of course the search engines have caught onto this and do not treat all links as being equal. Links from pages that are themselves well ranked, and that have content that is related to yours, will count most.

It's not easy to generate valid external links to your pages. On the plus side, most other webmasters are as eager as you are to increase their own external link count and will be receptive to a link exchange. On the negative side, getting these links is mostly a drawn out process of finding relevant pages, contacting the webmaster, and proposing an exchange.

Submitting Your Site

Once you have some external links pointing to your site, the search engines will almost surely find and index your pages. But why wait? By submitting your pages to the search engines you can speed the process as well as suggesting the best category or categories for you page to be listed in. Submission is no guarantee of a listing on a search engine because they will visit your page to see if it meets their standards. Some search engines share the same database, so submitting to one gets you submitted to the others too. At the present time, the database used by the Microsoft Network is also used by America Online, Excite, and Overture. Likewise, the Open Directory Project database is used by Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and Netscape. These relationships may change of course.

Beware of automated submission services and programs. It's so easy to bombard a search engine with tens of thousands of submissions using these, so the engines have in some cases started giving less credence to automatic submissions. Good old manual submission takes a little time but is more likely to have the desired effect. This table lists some of the major search engines and information for submitting pages to them.

Submission does not work instantly. It can take a few days to more than a week for your site to be evaluated and listed.

What Next?

Perhaps you want to do your own search engine optimization. It's not really that difficult. Or you may prefer to have someone with experience do it for you. There are plenty of people offering SEO services, that's for sure. Beware of extravagant claims such as "Top Listing on Google" or "Guaranteed #1 Placement." Stay away from any services that claim to "re-optimize" you page monthly. That's a load of nonsense, a page should need optimizing only once. In case you were wondering, I do offer SEO services (all except link generation). Click here if you would like to send me an inquiry.