General Tips for Search Engine Optimization Sandro Alberti (sandro@fen-om.com); September- 2009
1. 'Description' tag. This hidden tag will be included in each of your site pages, and is a descriptive summary of what can be found in your Web site. Once your site is listed on search engines, this is often what will appear as the description of your site. It is important that this content be brief (about 30 words maximum), and formatted in proper sentences. 2. 'Keywords' tag. This is another hidden tag that we include in each of your site pages. It contains a series of 'keywords': words or short terms that identify the content of your site. For example, in a skin-care Web site, relevant keywords can include: "skin, facials, microdermabrasion". In a car-sales Web site, keywords could be: "car, automobile, cash for clunkers, Toyota". We carefully research and select keywords from your Web site content as well as market studies and even dictionaries, to yield a range of words that can help search engines find your site. We work with you to refine this list of terms, until you are happy with it. It is important to note that one should not list more than 100 terms here (25 to 50 terms is ideal); too many terms can be considered 'spam' by search engines. 3. Direct submission to primary search sites. In most cases, your site can be submitted automatically. However, the major players (Google, Yahoo, etc.), require or expect your site to be submitted through a more direct and specific process. Google, for example, offers a specific 'add URL' Web page for submission of your page. Google also has a more complex process for generating a 'Google XML Sitemap' for your site. Yahoo, on the other hand, requires that one include a special encrypted key in your Web site, as part of its submission process. Finally, the OpenDirectory is the official submission source for engines such as AOL, AltaVista, and Lycos, and employs a staff to personally review your site submission. As part of your basic Web design services, we include all of these. 4. Automatic submission to secondary engines. Over the years, we have researched various tools and methods to automate submission to hundreds of search engines, beyond the primary ones (listed above; #3). This submission includes your site in the highest-rated Internet search engines and directories. 5. Structure of your site for search prominence. In making or updating your Web site, we ensure that the text content of your pages is relevant and searchable. We also employ program tags such as <h1> (the page’s primary header) in order to properly identify elements within your pages. Also important, we ensure crosslinking in your pages (various different links connecting the various pages in your site). And we maintain the overall site structure so that the 'deepest' levels are only a couple of levels in from the root level (distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled by search engines). We include Image Search Optimization, formatting images for high quality and properly tagged descriptions (and using the latest ‘image replacement’ techniques so that image locations are actually read as text by the search engines). Related to the topic of images, it is also possible to use special fonts in the design of your site (for the purpose of aesthetics and highlighting elements like headers). For this, we use technologies such as SIFR and FLIR, which allow for the presentation of this text in image format, but retaining the underlying ‘real’ text that can be read by search engines (see http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr3 and http://facelift.mawhorter.net ). Finally, if necessary, we also 'normalize' Web pages that can be accessed through several URLs, by using the 'canonical' tag.
6. Preventive crawling. We hide pages that search engines could consider to be 'spam' (such as search result pages inside your site), or that are not directly relevant to the public (such as the 'thank you' page that appears after a person submits a contact form in your site). 7. Microformats. A microformat is a series of semantic tags that can be added to any content in your Web site, in order to be accessible by automated processes that are becoming ever more popular ('semantic Web'). These are hidden tags that do not affect the experience of your site, but allow for your Web site to be 'understood' by computers as well as human beings. Typical of these are the tags that identify personal contact information in a Web site. For example: <div class="vcard"> <div class="fn">Joe Doe</div> <div class="org">The Example Company</div> <div class="tel">604-555-1234</div> <a class="url" href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a> </div> From this example you can see that the entire contact information is surrounded by a tag of class 'vcard' (which is the standard for a digital contact information record). The name is tagged 'fn' ('formatted name'), the company is 'org' ('organization'), the phone number is 'tel' ('telephone'), and the web link is 'url'. The full standards for microformats are found in www.microformats.org 8. Cross linking. Beyond the optimization of your site itself, SEO can be enhanced by having other Websites link to you (the idea is that, if you are referenced in other locations, you are probably pertinent; also, if you are referenced elsewhere, you can become popular in new networks and communities). A useful first step for this is to create links and landing pages in other locations that you also manage, such as Twitter and Facebook. 9. Other considerations. • Name files well. It’s important to name your site’s files so that they make sense to search engines. A contact form would better be named contact.php than 2.php. • Focus your links out. On a travel Web site, any outbound links should be to other sites that are relevant (hotel sites, destination sites, etc.) Search engines weigh these in the overall ‘definition’ of your site’s content. This is why it is good to have incoming rss feeds from news sites, since these populate your site with links related to your site’s topic. • Emphasis. Use the strong (or em) tag to emphasize important phrases or keywords a few times through your site. • Separate style from programming from content. It pays to apply proper CSS and JavaScript, so that it’s externalized from the main content of your site. Not only does this make it easier to reformat your site for computer screens or small mobile devices; it also makes it easier for search engines to identify your content. • Content Management Systems. If your site is designed as a CMS, that means that many of your Web pages will not really ‘exist’ and be available for search engine crawling. In a CMS, Web pages are created dynamically, at the time they are requested. When developing CMS sites, we ensure that URLs will not appear to be dynamic (and that they are keyword-rich), that unique meta tags can be assigned to particular pages, and that user-input content can be tagged for SEO. We also try and use SEO-specific modules, if any are available for the CMS (Drupal, for example has the following modules: Google Analytics, Related Links, SEO Checklist, and Sitemap). • Analytics. Understanding, and improving, the relevance of your content, is another way to optimize your site. Through site analytics tools (like Google Analytics), you can understand what pages/content are most relevant, and use that knowledge to improve those sections even further, or improving those others that are currently less relevant.