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SEO 101 - Basic Optimization Techniques
It is hard to believe the all too short northern summer is
almost over. In less than two weeks, kids will be going back to
school and commercial webmasters will be gearing up for the
autumn and winter sales seasons. This is as good a time as any,
perhaps better than most, to cover SEO 101, the basic techniques
that form the foundation to an advanced SEO or SEM campaign.
For the purposes of brevity this piece starts with a few
assumptions. The first assumption is a single, small business
site is being worked on. The second assumption is that the site
in question is written using a fairly standard mark-up language
such as HTML or PHP. The last assumption is that some form of
keyword research and determination has already taken place and
the webmaster is confident in the selection of keyword targets.
Believe it or not, basic SEO is all about common sense and
simplicity. The purpose of search engine optimization is to make
a website as search engine friendly as possible. It's really not
that difficult. Basic SEO doesn't require specialized knowledge
of algorithms, programming and taxonomy but it does require a
basic understanding of how search engines work. There are two
aspects of search engines to consider before jumping in. The
first is how spiders work. The second is how search engines
figure out what documents relate to which keywords and phrases.
In the simplest terms, search engines collect data about a
unique website by sending an electronic spider to visit the site
and copy its content which is stored in the search engine's
database. Generally known as 'bots', these spiders are designed
to follow links from one document to the next. As they copy and
assimilate content from one document, they record links and send
other bots to make copies of content on those linked documents.
This process continues ad infinitum. By sending out spiders and
collecting information 24/7, the major search engines have
established databases that measure their size in the tens of
billions. Every day, both Yahoo and Google claim to spider as
much data as is contained in the US Library of Congress (approx.
150 million items).
Knowing the spiders and how they read information on a site is
the technical end of basic SEO. Spiders are designed to read
site content like you and I read a newspaper. Starting in the
top left hand corner, a spider will read site content line by
line from left to right. If columns are used (as they are in
most sites), spiders will follow the left hand column to its
conclusion before moving to central and right hand columns. If a
spider encounters a link it can follow, it will record that link
and send another bot to copy and record data found on the
document the link leads to. The spider will proceed through the
site until it records everything it can possible find there.
As spiders follow links and record everything in their paths,
one can safely assume that if a link to a site exists, a spider
will find that site. Webmasters and SEOs no longer need to
manually or electronically submit their sites to the major
search engines. The search spiders are perfectly capable of
finding them on their own, provided a link to that site exists
somewhere on the web. Google and Yahoo both have an uncanny
ability to judge the topic or theme of documents they are
examining, and use that ability to judge the topical
relationship of documents that are linked together. The most
valuable incoming links (and the only ones worth perusing), come
from sites that share topical themes.
Once a search spider finds your site, helping it get around is
the first priority. One of the most important basic SEO tips is
to provide clear paths for spiders to follow from "point A" to
"point Z" in your website. This is best accomplished by
providing easy to follow text links directed to the most
important pages in the site at the bottom of each document. One
of these text links should lead to a text-based sitemap, which
lists and provides a text link to every document in the site.
The sitemap can be the most basic page in the site as its
purpose is more to direct spiders than help lost site visitors,
though designers should keep site visitors in mind when creating
the sitemap. Here is an example of the basic sitemap
(http://www.stepforth.com/company/sitemap.htm) used on the
StepForth site. Google also accepts more advanced, XML based
sitemaps, providing a wealth of information on their Sitemap FAQ
page
(https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html).
Allowing spiders free access to the entire website is not always
desirable. Good SEOs should also know how to tell spiders that
some site content is off limits and should not be added to their
database using robots.txt (http://www.robotstxt.org/) files.
Last week, Mike Banks Valentine of Website101
(http://www.website101.com/) wrote a good overview on how to
write and use robots.txt files in his article, "Search Engine
Spiders Lost Without Guidance - Post This Sign!"
(http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2005/aug/22.html)
Offering spiders access to the areas of the site one wants them
to access is half the battle. The other half is found in the
site content. Search engines are supposed to provide their users
with lists of documents that relate to user entered keyword
phrases or queries. Search engines need to determine which of
billions of documents is relevant to a small number of specific
words. In order to do this, the search engine needs to know your
site relates to those words.
There are four basic areas, or elements, a search engine looks
at when
examining a document. After the URL of a site, the first
information a search spider records is the title of the site.
Next, it examines the Description Meta tag. Both of these
elements are found in the section of the source code.
Titles should be written using the strongest keyword targets as
the foundation. StepForth's primary keyword target is Search
Engine Placement. A glance at our index page shows that phrase
is used as the first three words in our site title. Some titles
are written using two or three basic two-keyword phrases. A key
to writing a good title is to remember that human readers will
see the title as the reference link on the search engine results
page. Don't overload your title with keyword phrases.
Concentrate on the strongest keywords that best describe the
topic of the document content.
The Description Meta tag is also fairly important. Search
engines tend to use it to gather information on the topic or
theme of the document. A well written Description is phrased in
two or three complete sentences with the strongest keyword
phrases woven early into each sentence. As with the title tag,
some search engines will display the Description on the search
results pages, generally using it in whole or in part to provide
the text that appears under the reference link. Some search
engines place minor weight in the Keywords Meta tag however, it
is not advisable to spend a lot of time worrying about the
keywords tag. After reading information found in the section of
the source code, spiders continue on to examine site content. It
is wise to remember that spiders read the same way we do, left
to right and following columns.
Good content is the most important aspect of search engine
optimization. The easiest and most basic rule of the trade is
that search engine spiders can be relied upon to read basic body
text 100% of the time. By providing a search engine spider with
basic text content, SEOs offer the engines information in the
easiest format for them to read. While some search engines can
strip text and link content from Flash files, nothing beats
basic body text when it comes to providing information to the
spiders. Very good SEOs can almost always find a way to work
basic body text into a site without compromising the designer's
intended look, feel and functionality.
The content itself should be thematically focused. In other
words, keep it simple. Some documents cover multiple topics on
each page, which is confusing for spiders and SEOs alike. The
basic SEO rule here is if you need to express more than one
topic on a page, you need more pages. Fortunately, creating new
pages with unique topic-focused content is one of the most basic
SEO techniques, making a site simpler for both live-users and
electronic spiders. An important caveat is to avoid duplicate
content and the temptation to construct doorway pages
specifically designed for search placements.
When writing document content, try to use the strongest keyword
targets early in the copy. For example, a site selling the
ubiquitous Blue Widget might use the following as a
lead-sentence; "Blue Widgets by Widget and Co. are the strongest
construction widgets available and are the trusted widget of
leading builders and contractors."
The primary target is obviously construction applications for
the blue widget. By placing the keyword phrases "blue widgets",
"construction widgets" and "trusted widget" along side other
keywords such as the singular words, "strongest", "trusted" and
"builders" and "contractors", the sentence is crafted to help
the search engine see a relationship between these words.
Subsequent sentences would also have keywords and phrases weaved
into them. One thing to keep in mind when writing basic SEO copy
is that unnecessary repetition of keywords is often considered
spam by search engines. Another thing to remember is that
ultimately, the written copy is meant to be read by human eyes
as well as search spiders. Each page or document in the site
should have its own unique content.
The last on-site element a spider examines when reading the site
(and later relating the content to user queries), is the anchor
text used in internal links. Using relevant keyword phrases in
the anchor text is a basic SEO technique aimed at solidifying
the search engine's perception of the relationship between
documents and the words used to phrase the link. A good example
is found on towards the bottom of pages in the StepForth site
(http://stepforth.com/). Note the use of the words "placement
services", "seo results", "SEO Faq" and the topic of the
internal pages these links point to.
In a nutshell, that's pretty much it to the basics of clean,
search engine friendly SEO. The foundation of nearly every
successful SEO campaign is simplicity. The goal is to make a
site easy to find, easy to follow, and easy to read for search
spiders and live-visitors, with well written topical content and
a fair number of relevant incoming links. While basic SEO can be
time consuming in the early stages, the results are almost
always worth it and set the stage for more advanced future work.
About the author:
Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing
expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time for
StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine
Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes
the opportunity to share his experience through interviews,
articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at jimhedger@stepforth.com
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