What you can control
In part one of this SEO blog post, we discussed how search engines rank pages partly by counting backlinks. This may leave the site owner asking, “is this all out of my control?” The search engine algorithms are trade secrets, but there are a few aspects of it that we know. This knowledge can help an owner create a site that looks more lucrative to the search engines while creating better websites for the user overall.
Content is King
The quality of your content is what will drive traffic to your site, have people talking about it and ultimately linking to it.
When you create the content for your site, you want it to be as easy to read for the search engines as it is for humans. For this reason you want the bulk of your content to be HTML text. Both humans and search engines can read HTML text. The difference comes in the form of rich media such as photos, videos and Flash and Java plugins. Search engines can’t look at a photo or video and understand the content of it. To alleviate this issue, use the “alt” tag to give context to photos. For videos, add the transcript or a description of the video as text on the page. And finally for other rich content like Flash, Java plugins, or search boxes, supplement it with text on the page.
How are your links Structured
Your website’s internal links are very important to search engines. They are the pathways to your entire site. That is why it is a good idea to have a suitable navigation so that your users and search engines can visit every corner of your site.
Some websites are structured in such a way that some pages are only accessible after a search, through logging in, or some other method that requires human logic to find. This limits what the search engine can find since they can only navigate your site using crawlable links.
A crawlable link structure means that every page on your site can be visited by just clicking the links on it’s pages. This is optimal for search engine bots to find every page on your site and index them.
Keywords and you
The very act of search is to use keywords to find websites that match what you requested. The search engines use the keywords or phrase to match sites that most closely relate to the keywords. The way we order or phrase the query matters to the search engines and they try to give us the results that they think most closely matches what we are asking for. A more specific query will give the search engines more information to find a more relevant website for your query. For instance, if you search the keyword “dog,” you will receive pages about lots of different dogs. However if you search for the keywords, “golden retriever dog,” the engines will return more specific results.
When it comes to matching a page to a query, the search engines use spelling, punctuation, and capitalization as well as how the keywords are used on a page to determine the relevance of a site to a query.
One of the best ways to optimize your page’s rankings is to ensure that the keywords you want to rank for are used in titles, text, and metadata and most importantly the Title Tag (more on this one later).
A word of caution when it comes to keywords: don’t think you can influence the ranking of your site by peppering in keywords all over your page. The algorithms that the developers have built are smart enough to know when you are “keyword stuffing” and your site could be flagged and then dropped in rank, counterproductively. There are some methods that you can employ to optimize the SEO of your site but it’s important to use the keywords you are targeting in phrases in the content naturally. You want to provide the most value for someone visiting your website based on what you offer rather that trying to cast a wide net that ensnares everyone.
The smart people at moz.com (1) have put together some points for keyword optimization. They are as follows:
- In the title tag at least once. Try to keep the keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. More detail on title tags follows later in this section.
- Once prominently near the top of the page.
- At least two or three times, including variations, in the body copy on the page. Perhaps a few more times if there’s a lot of text content. You may find additional value in using the keyword or variations more than this, but in our experience adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little or no impact on rankings.
- At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can occasionally bring valuable traffic.
- Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later on in this section.
- At least once in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does not get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers reading the results page, as the meta description becomes the snippet of text used by the search engines.
The Title Tag
Like titles of books or movies, titles of websites are the first interaction that a visitor will have with your site and brand. The title tag should instill a positive emotional response to the visitor so as to grab the user’s attention and make your site more attractive. The search engines will display your site’s title tag in their search results page, so you want a title that will stand out.
Search engines will also use the title tag to calculate SEO ranking for a site. The keywords that are in your title tag play a large part of how the search engines index your site. Priority will be given to the keywords at the start of your title tag so you should plan to have the keywords that you want to rank well for at the beginning. You should also include your brand in the title as it will help the search engines associate your page with your brand.
Some pitfalls to avoid are keyword stuffing and the length of your title. While there is no limit on the length of the title tag, the search engines will only display the first 65-75 characters of a title tag in the search results page. More characters passed the 65-75 soft limit will be cut off and displayed as an ellipsis “…” to indicate to the user that there is additional title. There is a distinction in the search engine algorithms that determine when a title is “descriptive” or just being “keyword stuffed.” Keyword stuffing is when you try to stuff in too many keywords into your title. The search engines will flag this as malicious and could hurt your rankings with those keywords.
There is a careful balance that has to be maintained when writing the title tag for your human versus search engine users. Consider who your audience is and generally the phrase that you would write to attract that audience will contain the keywords that you want the search engines to index. You can then optimize for SEO from that starting point.
Meta Description
In the old days of SEO, Meta tags used to be the only item that needed consideration for proper ranking. Today, the major search engines have all but phased them out. One exception is the meta description tag. Don’t think that the search engines use the meta description tag for ranking your site, they all but ignore the keywords in the description tag. Instead the description tag serves as the description for your site when it appears in the search results page. This tag should be used to describe your site to potential human visitors and, like the title tag, should be engaging and positive for your audience.
Again, we have only scratched the surface for search engine Optimization and I highly recommend reading the Beginner’s Guide To SEO (2) at moz.com for a more complete understanding of the basic principles of SEO.
(1) Keywords Tips