| By: Master Web Creations
April 19, 2005
Everybody wants their web site listed as the first in any
particular search, but many web site owners and web site maintainers
don’t understand what it takes to get the hits that they want.
There is also a major difference in the quantity and quality
of hits. The most important part in web usability is designing
the site for the user – if the site is designed with the audience
in mind, naturally, the site should be optimized for search
engines.
In order to understand SEO, you must first understand your
audience – who they are, what they are looking for and where
they will go to find it. You can start gathering this information
by conducting a formal or informal survey of your existing
clients or current customers. Your survey can include questions
regarding the search words they might use and which search
engine they prefer to use for that particular search. (You
may even go more in depth by conducting a focus group and
designing your site around the results of the users’ behaviors.)
You can ask people informally. Just take care in who you ask, you
want to ask knowledgeable and experienced web users as opposed
to (non-) users who have never performed an internet research. Some businesses will even
share their internet marketing experiences with fellow business
owners. This is the time to get creative and active in planning your web site.
Once you define your audience in a hierarchy, then you need
to understand simple html tags and their purposes – the tags
important to both the audience and the search engines include
the title, description, keywords, alt text, links (<a
href>) and heading (<H1>, <H2> and <H3>)
tags. Those web site owners and maintainers that are well
versed in html (can you create a table in notepad?) should
also expand their knowledgebase by learning cascading style
sheets and web site usability.
- The <title> at the beginning of the html file
is exactly that – the title of the document. It should be
slightly descriptive, use at least one primary keyword phrase,
and be less than 40 characters long.
- The <description> is also a very easy to understand
html tag. It describes the document, which should contain
primary keyword phrases. This tag should be less than 100
characters long.
- The <keywords> tag can get tricky. You should
use some of the primary keyword phrases for your entire
site, placed at different places throughout your keyword
list, with the descriptive keywords for that particular
document being most prominent. You can list as many keywords
as you want, but the fewer you use, the closer to your target
audience you will get. (Depending on their choice of search
words, users will have results that are more relevant.)
- The <alt> and link tags go hand in hand when designing
a site for the user. The alt text is the text that pops
up near their pointer when a user moves their mouse over
a link. Its purpose is to describe the link so the user
can decide if that is what they are looking for, especially
when the link is only one word. Again, your alt text can
be as long as you like, but preciseness is key.
- Finally, the heading tags are your titles and sub-titles
of the content of the document. Using a hierarchy of titles
makes your content easier to read or skim so the user can
decide if the content is applicable to their search. One
might argue that there are more “browsers” than “searchers”,
and an applicable retort might be, ‘when you browse, are
you not searching for something that interests you?’ You
can also use alt text within your heading tags, but unless
your headings are links, the user will not get a description
box. Using cascading style sheets to define the style of
your headings and sub-headings will give you and your user
pleasing results.
Now that you have defined your audience and understand the
purpose of the html tags as designed by Tim Berners-Lee (and
crew), you are ready for the next step – understanding how
search engines work. Search engines parse the data contained
in your public domain. They ‘read’ and ‘archive’ the contents
of the html tags described above as well as the content of
your site. Certain search engines limit the amount of data
they parse and they have limitations to which web sites they
will spider (read). For example, if your keywords repeat ‘website
usability statistics’ four times or more in a row, it is almost
certain that a search engine will not index (archive) your
site. There are many other rules they have in place for preventing
search engine spamming including text in a web page that is
the same color as the background, keywords that do not apply
to the site's content and pages that redirect. You can check
most search engines’ help or about pages for lists of techniques
that would prevent them from indexing your site. The most
effective way to get the best results is designing for the
user, not the search engines.
Once you have your html tags laid out, or know
how you will lay them out, you need to fill in your site with
valuable content. No one wants to visit an empty page. Your
content should contain as many of the keywords and phrases
listed in the html tags and vice versa – your keywords, title,
description and headings should reflect the content of that
page (for links, the alt text should be optimized for the
page that it links to). The content and html tags should be
applicable to your business, service or product and appeal
greatly to the audience you defined.
Two search engines should be addressed separately – MSN and
Google. Neither of these search engines pays any attention
to the keywords that you specify in your Meta tags. MSN does
a good job of explaining how your site is spidered, indexed
and ultimately ranked and displayed. “The MSN Search ranking
algorithm analyzes factors such as page content, the number
and quality of sites that link to your pages, and the relevance
of your site’s content to keywords”. They also offer more
information than Google on how their search works, “it analyzes
the content on indexed pages and generates keywords to associate
with each page” and constructs a site description for you,
extracted from the content of the page, when there is no Meta
tag present.
Google, on the other hand, has a patented (secret) algorithm
that they do not disclose to the public. Your best bet for
the highest rankings with Google is to ensure that your site
title contains keyword phrases that are found in both your
other Meta tags and your content and submit your site to dmoz.
You can also increase your site rankings by ensuring hits
to your website by developing relationships with complementary
and otherwise related sites (if you link to my site, I’ll
link to yours). This does not imply that you become a victim
of the internet’s pyramid schemes and linking scams. If it
applies to your product or service, purchasing advertising
(and/or placing ad banners on other sites) is generally a
good marketing strategy.
A well-designed site that follows web usability standards,
thus, is also effective in search engine optimization. The
more quality content you have, the better your rankings will
be, according to your specified audience.
~ a www.masterwebcreations.com article |
