Be Smart About Search Engine Optimization

When you build web sites for a living, you get a lot of requests for search engine optimization. There are a lot of myths floating around out there, and there are a lot of con artists willing to make a dime from a web site owner’s lack of knowledge.

Avoid the Con Artists

The first thing you should know is that nobody can guarantee you placement in a search engine – absolutely nobody. A sure sign that you’re dealing with a con artist is a guarantee of number one placement or first page placement.

Understand How Search Engines Work

Search engines work very hard to keep their methods for determining search results a secret. They also are updating and changing those methods constantly. A simple tweak to Google’s search algorithm could move your site from page 6 to page 1 or from page 1 to page 11 overnight.

Keep in mind that a search engine stays in business by reliably delivering relevant content to searchers. When someone wants to know about the diet of elephants, for example, a search engine has to figure out what are the best sites for learning about what elephants eat. If that person gets sent off to a weight loss blog where someone wrote, “I feel like an elephant! I need to go on a diet”, they’re not going to be very satisfied with the search engine they used.

Of course, your goal is to get your content in front of as many people as possible. So try to strike a nice balance. Help the search engines figure out which searchers are looking for your content. You may not get as much traffic that way, but you’ll get quality traffic. I’d much rather have 10 visits from people actually interested in my services than 1000 visits from people with no interest in my services whatsoever.

Stay Off the Blacklist

If your sites makes use of what have become known as ‘black hat’ techniques, there’s a very good chance that the search engines will figure this out and will remove your site from their index. Avoid techniques like this:

• Keyword stuffing. Read your site’s content aloud, or have someone read it to you. The number of times your keywords are mentioned should sound natural. If the text sounds awkward, then it probably needs to be reworked to use keywords with a little less frequency.
• Hidden text and links. Don’t add paragraphs of text or chunks of links the same color as your background to pages. Don’t use CSS to hide content that contains a high concentration of keywords.
• Extra pages. Don’t add a bunch of extra pages with duplicate content to your site. Sometimes this is done by rewording one article several different ways and posting it up 10 or 20 times.

You can tell if your site has been blacklisted by going to a search engine and typing in your domain name. For example, if you go to a search engine and type in yourdomain.com and there are no results, that’s a sure sign you’ve been blacklisted. The best way to correct the situation is to remove the black hat seo techniques from your site, then contact the search engine via email or a contact us form to let them know you’ve corrected the error of your ways and wish to be included again in their index.

In the End, It’s Passive Marketing

If you’re focusing on SEO alone to promote your site, you probably want to reconsider your approach for a few reasons:

• SEO is an awful lot like gambling. There’s no guarantee of results and no guarantee that any results you do get will last.
• It’s passive marketing – you’re only marketing to potential customers who are already aware of your product or service.
• Too much focus on SEO can hurt the usability of your site. A site built with only search engines in mind often becomes difficult and frustrating for people to use. Don’t put up barriers for your customers.

Things to Avoid

The following things can hurt your search engine optimization efforts, and sometimes your site’s usability:

• Splash pages. A splash page is a site that exists only for design purposes, and often contains a Flash animation. They’re often included to make a good impression, but they’re frustrating to returning visitors who just want to find your hours of operation or your phone number, but are forced to wait through the animation. They’re also a barrier to search engines.
• Flash navigation. Flash navigation can be made accessible, usable, and search engine friendly, but more often than not, the developer doesn’t take the extra steps necessary to accomplish any of these goals. Flash navigation can be confusing to your site visitors and can prevent search engines from being able to index your site.
• “Click here”. A search engine examines the text inside your links to find any keywords that might be relevant to the linked page. “Click here” doesn’t include any keywords or give any indication what content might be found behind the link. Disabled users browsing only your links and not the surrounding text will have a hard time finding their way around. Instead of saying, “To view our contact page, click here” say “View our contact information“.

Best Bet Techniques

These are the best ways to improve the quality of your traffic sent by search engines:

• For developers and coders:

  • Semantic markup. Use the HTML tags that are most relevant to your content. Don’t use tables for layout and be sure to use heading tags for headings.
  • Progressive enhancement: Remember, search engines don’t have Flash or JavaScript, so make sure your content is available without either.
  • Friendly URLs: If your site is built on a CMS or blog engine, there’s a good chance that the default link structure won’t be easy to remember for human beings. The link to your ‘contact’ page could look like this: http://www.mysite.com?page=3. Figure out how to make those easier to remember, like this: http://www.mysite.com/contact.
  • Site structure. Arrange your pages in a hierarchy that makes sense with related content together.
  • Clean code. Keep your markup as light and clean as possible.

• For everyone:

  • Natural use of keywords: Don’t over-saturate your content with your keywords. Read it aloud or have someone else read it aloud to you to make sure it sounds natural and not like name-dropping.
  • Be clear and concise. Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. Make use of headers and lists where appropriate.
  • Encourage quality link backs. Particpating in link exchanges with sites whose content is unrelated to the content of your site will hurt your search engine ranking. If you do participate in a link exchange, be sure that the other sites are relevant. Even better are incoming links to your content from blogs, wikis, social networking sites, and news sites. The more trusted and established the site linking to you, the better the quality of the link.
  • Focus on pages, not sites. Search engines index your pages, not your site. Not everyone will land on your homepage, so make sure all your pages have navigation and branding and make it clear what type of site you have and what type of content is on offer.
  • Useful titles. The page title of your page is what appears on the tab inside your browser, it’s the text the user will see when they bookmark your site, and it’s the text visible on the title bar of your browser window when you’re looking at your site. Make sure your title is relevant and includes a couple of keywords relevant to the content of that page. Don’t use the same title on all pages of your site.
  • Alt attributes. Make sure that any images added to your site have an alt attribute so that visitors who can’t see images for any reason will be able to tell what content they’re missing, and so that search engines will be able to index your image content. Without alt text, there’s no way for unsighted viewers or search engines to know what information is contained in your images.
  • Use headers, strong, and emphasis tags. Sometimes the buttons to include these elements are easy and obvious in a content management system or blog, but sometimes, they’re tucked away. Learn how to add them to your content so that your headers are marked up as headers and emphasized words receive more emphasis to search engines.