SEO Tutorial

SEO Tutorial

Search Engine Optimization Tutorial - "How To SEO"

Search Engine Optimization:

the process of making a site "search engine-friendly" — also known as "SEO" -- is probably the most important aspect of website design. Many, many commercial websites are designed and set up by people who know little or nothing about search engine optimization — how to give the search engines what they need to see when they index your site. This long page contains the information (or links to it) that web designers SHOULD know about optimizing a website for the search engines.

Here's a short video that explains what SEO is all about, from our friends at Common Craft. Watch this to get an overview of why it is important to optimize a website for Google and Bing (which are really the only two major search engines left).The most important thing to know about search engines is that SEARCH ENGINES ONLY INDEX TEXT. Make that your mantra while designing and optimizing your website. They don't index images well, and they don't index Flash well. Although there are some exceptions to that rule, as search engines are becoming more intelligent and more able to index files such as PDFs and the captions of graphic files, and some of the text in a Flash file — for all practical purposes just remember that rule: Search engines only index text and you won't go too far wrong in search engine optimization.

For a technical "how to" on optimizing Flash files, see this page from J E Hochman, and for an up-to-date late-2010 summary of the pros and cons of trying to optimize Flash, see this article from WebsiteMagazine. (Note that we use these same techniques when optimizing Flash sites.)

There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better rankings in the search engines — and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one magic thing you can do to get top placement at a search engine for your website. But you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select that are relevant to your web pages.

You can and should optimize more than one page of your website for the search engines; it's not something you do on just one page and skip doing on the rest of the site. You can optimize your home page for your single most important keyword phrase and other pages for different key word phrases. If you sell different products on different pages, each page can be optimized for that particular product. That's a good way to organize it. We recommend search engine optimization on at least a dozen main pages of your site, for the best effect. Don't bother optimizing pages on which you do not have public content, or pages such as a "contact us" or "privacy policy" or "copyright info" pages. (No one will be searching for your copyright info.) The pages you want to optimize are the pages you want people to find — those pages with content about your service or product--whatever you are selling.Search Engine Optimization – Let's get started!

To get a good feel for what is required in optimizing a normal commercial website for the search engines, let's pretend we're creating a website which sells after-market accessories for the "Alfa Romeo Alfetta", a 70's 4-door sports car that provides a snap-your-head-back kind of driving experience. (It is a car with a small but fanatical base of fans.) Our site will sell floor mats, hood ornaments, key chains, steering wheels, and so on -- all for the Alfa Romeo Alfetta.


Alfa Romeo Alfetta
Pick a Good Domain Name

This step is not very important - but every little bit helps. For the perfect domain name match-up in a search engine so that a page of our "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" website comes up #1 in the search results, the website itself would be best named:

http://www.alfa-romeo-alfetta.com

For more info on picking a good domain name for optimum search engine placement, and what you can do if you already have a domain name that isn't very good in this respect.Don't sweat it if you haven't got a great domain name, you can skip this step. This aspect of search engine optimization doesn't count for much, just a little.

Pick a Good Web Hosting Company:

What type of website hosting company do you have? This can be very important to the search engines. Free website hosting is usually bad for search engine rankings, for several reasons. For a detailed article about how your website hosting company can affect your rankings in the search engines by Larisa Thomson (Senior Web Analyst for Net Mechanic.
The most important factor is that your website should have its own "static" IP address. In other words, its numeric IP address should be stable, and not be different every time someone types in your URL--that's called a "dynamic" IP Address and is typical of Windows IIS Hosting. Big hosting companies typically use "dynamically assigned" IP addresses which work this way: when someone types in your URL into his browser, the HTTP request is presented to your hosting company's server, which quickly assigns an IP address to your website files on its server and connects the visitor to your files. Some search engines don't like this, for various technical reasons.

But more importantly, if your web hosting company has some "bad hats" (spammers or pornographers or whatever) who have been banned from search engines for good reason, your site could also be banned "by association" because, to the Search Engine your site's IP address looks to be that of the bad hats. In the eyes of the search engines it has an identical numeric IP address -- the one that belongs to your web hosting company.

If you are serious about getting good search engine rankings for your site, you need to have a static IP address of your own. If you don't know whether you do or not, call or email your web hosting company and find out whether your IP address for your site is static or dynamic. If it a static IP address, they should be able to tell you exactly what your static numeric IP address is. Find out what that is. For example, the static numeric IP address for Words in a Row is: 65.38.173.39. You should be able to substitute your numeric IP address after the "http://______", type that into your browser and go directly to your website.

Figure Out Your Key Word Phrases:

Your next step should be to do some homework and figure out what your key word phrases should be for your website pages. You need to make a short list of 1 or 2 key word phrases for each page of the site you want to optimize. Each phrase should be no more than three or four words. It is okay if the same words are in more than one key word phrase, and it is okay if some of the pages overlap their keyword phrases.

For each page you should wind up with a list of no more than two key word phrases, each less than three or four words long. Longer phrases are less effective. Single words are often useless. The word "Software" for example, is ignored by many search engines - it is what they call a "stop" word, like "the" or "a" - they just ignore it when you search for it, unless you put it inside quotation marks or otherwise make it clear it is part of your search.

Set up your Meta Tags:

There are several "tags" that go into the HTML code for a page of a website. These tags are placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD>. These are invisible to the average person browsing the site but are used by the search engines when they come crawling through your site and index the pages--a process called "spidering". These tags should be present on every page of the website. The most important tags are:
The <title> tag
and the "description" <meta> tag.

The "keyword" <meta> tag used to be important but is basically useless now.

Set up your <Title> Tag

Our site would contain a <title> tag like this:

<title>Alfa Romeo Alfetta Accessories</title>

What we put in here is based on the key word phrases we figured out above. It should contain our main key word phrase, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" at least once. It shouldn't contain more than 60 characters. In fact, if you can make it seven words or less (discounting words like "and" and "for", which the search engines ignore anyway) you're better off.

The <title> tag must contain the main keyword phrase for which you are optimizing that page. Google in particular places heavy emphasis on what is in your page's <title> tag. So does Bing.

Set up your Meta Keyword Tag

The <meta> keyword tag will contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:

<meta name="keywords" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta, automobile accessories, aftermarket, hood ornaments, floor mats, auto parts, blah, blah, blah">

Don't make this more than about 250 characters long. Don't use the same key word more than twice in it. Vary the capitalization. Don't use all capital letters unless the word is an acronym, like "SEO", which is short for Search Engine Optimization. Don't use words in it that don't show up in the body text on the page. In practical terms, you can delete this keywords meta tag without any consequence. Better not to have a keywords meta tag than one that is filled with keywords that don't show up on your pages; it can count against you!

Note: Don't obsess about the keywords tag. It is mostly disregarded nowadays due to abuse by people stuffing keywords that didn't belong into it. You can almost skip it entirely.

Set up your Meta Description Tag:

The <meta> description tag is a description of the page. It should contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:

<meta name="description" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta accessories, blah, blah, blah">

This tag should describe the specific page it is on, not the whole website. This is the description of the page that shows up at the search engine when someone is lucky enough to find this page in a search. Don't make the description more than about 200 characters long. Make it descriptive, and make sure it contains your key word phrases!

We won't repeat individual key words more than twice in any one meta tag because that can get a site banned from a search engines for something called "spamdexing", which is "spamming" the index of a search engine. It's also known as "keyword stuffing"; don't do it! For more info on how to avoid spamming the search engines.

Put Key Words in Headings:

Back to our Alfa Romeo Alfetta site: It will have "headings" like the one at the top of this section. It was created using heading tags that look like this: <H2>Put Key Words in Headings</H2>.

These "headings" make your browser display the text larger and set it aside from the rest of the text, on its own line. Search engines will look for and index our headings when they index the pages on our site, so our headings should ALSO contain the main key word phrases for our site, like this:
<h1>Alfa Romeo Alfetta</h1>

<h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Hood Ornaments</h2>

<h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Maintenance Manuals</h2>

<h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Floor Mats</h2>

and so on through as many headings (in this case our products for sale) as we can think of that we want to include on that page.

Headings like that are weighted heavily in the search engines -- many of them use a formula that LIKES the key words in headings more than elsewhere in the site. Don't neglect these. Use them to set off areas of text, in the same way this page you are reading is divided up by headings.

Note: Some people detest using headings because they tend to be big clunky elements in web designs, and they can add a lot of space down the page. You can easily bypass this using a simple inline style command, like this:

<H1 style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 12px;">This will make a small heading with no space after it!</H1>

Use Key Words in Your Text:

Our optimized page would contain TEXT of at least 250 words, with the key word phrase "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" occurring several times near the beginning of the text. If a page doesn't contain at least 250 words, some search engines won't bother to index it. It's preferable to have 500 words or more if possible, on a page. You'll get better results from the search engines if you have more text.

It also seems to help to put the key word phrase near the end of the text, too. Search engines use a factor called "key word density" to determine how relevant that key word you're using is to the page. If it shows up a few times in the text, it is more "dense". Key word density is a good thing, up to a certain point. The main thing is to make sure you have some text that describes what you do or what you're selling - that makes your page a resource worth indexing.

In the HTML code for the page, the text should be as close to the beginning of the page as possible, because there is a limit to how far down into a page a search engine spider will go to try to find text. It is generally agreed that this is 3kb. That's only about 80-100 lines of code! So make sure your text comes before some really long JavaScript menu in the code for the page, or else the search engine won't make it far enough into the page to index the text. They'll never see the text if it is buried way down at the end of the code.

There's a trick of the <table> one can use to keep your menu bar on the left side of the page (where most people put a navigation menu) and still have the text of the page come first in the code. Normally to display to the left, the nav bar has to come first in the code. But not if you use this table trick. Of course if you use HTML/CSS only (no tables) then you won't need the table trick.

Table Trick:

I've been asked many times about how to perform this table trick, where one can put the CODE for a left-hand navigation bar AFTER the text of the page, and still have the navigation bar display over on the left. Here's the code to perform this feat. Feel free to steal it and use it by just selecting it and copying it.

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr valign="top">
<td><!-- leave this TD empty - it will disappear --></td>
<td rowspan=2>Put the text for the page here. </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td>Put the Navigation Bar Here</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>


That rowspan=2 inside the TD (table data) is what does it. This table displays with the navigation bar on the left and the text of the page on the right. That allows you to get the text for your page closer to the top of the page, so that it is within the first 3kb of the page.

Why is this important? The closer to the beginning of the file, the more important the text in it seems to be to Google.

Put Key Words in Alt Tags:

Pictures on a website can and should contain a little text description that only shows up when you move your mouse over the picture. That little description is called an "ALT tag" ("ALT" is short for "alternate"). Hold your mouse over the picture on the right for a couple of seconds and your browser will display the ALT tag for the picture in most browsers.


Put Key Words in Anchor Tags

Hypertext links on your site usually look something like this:

<a href="floor-mats.html">. Those are called "anchor tags" — that's what the "a" stands for. You can put some other information in there, which will show up when one mouses over the link. It would look like this:

Sample Anchor Tag:

<a href="blah.html" title="Alfa Romeo Alfetta floor mats"> Alfa Romeo Floor Mats </a>

-- if the link points to the floor-mats.html page. When someone mouses over the link, they will see what you put in the title. These "titles" for the anchor tags get indexed by the search engines. Every little bit helps! Make sure the words that you wrap the anchor tag around are keywords, too, whenever possible.

Register in the Search Engines:

Here's where to go to register with the main search engines:

Register my website at Google

Register my website at Yahoo

Register my website at Bing