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Search Engine Optimization and Website Marketing
Introduction
This is a introduction to SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) and
Website promotion. It is intended to give an overview of the
techniques involved and to accompany any results you have from our
website audit. (The items here are the main areas, but not all of
those that may require attention to tune a website to achieve good
results.)
Once a site is tuned you will still need ongoing adjustments, content
and monitoring. Even then a site will take at least 3 months to start
to grow from these methods.
Major indicators
These are the dials on the dashboard so to speak, easy to find
information that you can gather before you start any SEO campaign,
they give you your starting point, and by checking them regularly you
can see the effectiveness of your work. They can also be used to
monitor how well the competition is doing and to see how you compare.
Google page rank
This is one of the easiest to find out but one of the hardest to
influence, this is a simple 1 to 10 score, with 10 being the best,
that Google rate your website. This affects how you're spidered, where
your results rank and is a major indicator of the success of a web
site.
Google cache and spidering
Google keep a copy of all pages, and by viewing the copies of yours
you can find out some interesting information. When did Google last
index your page, and put information in its results? How many pages
did it spider ? if any? And how do the pages look, if they are wrong
then you need to fix your site NOW!
Alexa and the Alexa rating
The Alexa information is a great benchmark and stores data for years,
so for any of the information it supplies you can look at growth
(hopefully) for the last 2 years or more.
Millions of people around the world have the Alexa tool bar, and it
monitors their web usage and patterns. From this it gives a wealth of
useful information to help both surfers and the web masters /
programmers. The rating is similar to the Google Page rank system,
with 1 being the highest and going down to 5,000,000+
Alexa reach
Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as
the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for
example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that
if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on
average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses
reach as number of users per million
Alexa page views
Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Tool bar users.
Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same
day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the
average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users
visiting the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based
solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user).
Competitors figures
Alexa and to a lesser extent Google let you view all of their
information about any site, so check out your competitors ? see how
your site rates in comparison . The tool bar also shows similar site,
sites which surfers also visited and sites which link to your site.
Links
Link popularity check is one of the best ways to quantifiably and
independently measure your websites online awareness and overall
visibility. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of
links or "votes" that a search engine has found for your website.
Search engine saturation
Search Engine Saturation simply refers to the number of pages a given
search engine has in its index for your website domain. Not all search
engines report this information but enough of them do to create some
meaningful benchmarks for your search engine marketing campaigns.
Symptoms / Remedies
These are some of the major problems which will effect a site and its
ability to generate traffic, they all combine but not evenly, so you
could have all but one of them spot on, but the one thing missing
could cripple the site ? conversely you can have all of them 90% right
and nothing works, it is still a matter of trial and error but this
gives a good framework to start working on.
Load times
While large numbers of people have broadband connections, there are
still large numbers of people with slow or dial up connections, and
with people accessing the web on mobile phones and PDA's we should
still try to keep loading times to a minimum, or at the very least
warn the user if they are about to attempt to download a huge file .
Frames
Not as common as they used to be, frames are a method of dividing up
the page into small areas, the problem is they all have different
addresses, and can display very differently on different machines and
/ or browsers. Search engines don't like these much either, and they
really are not needed much now, there are occasions where they are
needed, but make sure if you have them, you really need them and they
are done properly.
Accessibility
While this should apply to all sites, in reality its much more
important for some sites than others ? typically government bodies and
schools etc, however we should all try to be adhere to some rules,
after all. Why would you want to hinder someone from using your site?
In the context of websites, accessibility is a buzz word for a site's
ability to be used by anybody no matter what their physical or
technological circumstances may be. As authors we tend to only know if
our site works in our favourite browser and look or come across ok to
us. Accessibility is all about taking into account the variety of
needs amongst our users:
They may not be able to see, hear, move, or may not be able to process
some types of information easily or at all.
They may have difficulty reading or comprehending text.
They may not have or be able to use a keyboard or mouse.
They may have a text only screen, a small screen, or a slow Internet connection.
They may not speak or understand fluently the language in which the
document is written.
They may be in a situation where their eyes, ears, or hands are busy
or interfered with (e.g., driving to work, working in a loud
environment, etc.).
They may have an early version of a browser, a different browser
entirely, a voice browser, or a different operating system.
Flash
This is a great programming tool that is unfortunately used in
completely the wrong way. It is ideal for making pretty little
animations, and cool logos etc. The problems occur when whole sites
are made from it. The problem is that as well as requiring special add
on software to view it, and plenty of users either don't have it, cant
be bothered installing it or are not allowed to ? in work environments
for example, where a massive chunk of personal Internet use is done.
However it gets worse, search engines really don't like flash based
sites. They can treat them as almost empty sites, with no navigation,
no content and no search results....or traffic.
Flash has its place, but don't fall into the trap of spending
thousands on a massive flash project because you could soon be
regretting it. Sensible use in a good HTML site is the way to go. If
you do insist on using flash, develop a HTM version of the site also,
or at least a html navigation system and a few plain pages of text.
Spider result / map
No website is of use without traffic, and unless you have huge brand
awareness like Coke or Ford, where people will probably be able to
guess what your site is, ( although we will come back to that later)
you need search engines to supply you with visitors. Search engines
work by trying to look at every page on your site, and reading it to
see what it is about, how good it is and how relevant the content is.
The first stage is to be able penetrate the site. Remarkably a lot of
sites are actually constructed in ways that prevent this from
happening, the equivalent of producing a book and gluing the cover
closed. We have the ability to analyse your site and run a virtual
search engine over it, to see how it looks from their point of view,
and if it can't get in ? or SPIDER your site, you have very big
problems.
Updated
Search engines are all about content, because that is what people
search for. One of the things search engines take into account is how
current you website is, has it been updated recently? Is there
something new for people to see? If a search engine has a choice of
two sites with similar content, the one that is updated more recently
will get the better results.
Content
The most important part of any site, what is the point of having a
pretty site, that search engines love, you advertise to all you
customers and its on all your printed material, if its dull, boring ?
uninformative and empty? No one is going to be bothered. There are
sites that have dozens of pages but if you add all the content
together it barely fills two pages of A4 paper.
You need content for you readers, and for the search engines because
they need it to decide what your site is about, and where to put it in
the results. But its not just quantity. So while we are looking at
content we need to look at clarity.
Clarity
The magnitude of an online presence is not in relation to the
complexity of the verbal or linguistic content represented on each
section of the development. .......... get the point? Too many sites
make no sense at all, full of abbreviations, jargon and buzzwords.
It's not big, it's not clever, and most of it it doesn't work, it
alienates readers, and makes sites confusing and off putting. Keep it
clear, you don't have to write for a 5 year old, but be sensible. We
were one asked to look at a clients site, and after reading 6 pages,
we genuinely had no idea what they did! Don't fall into this trap.
Quality
Lots of clear content is great, but the last thing is to check is the
quality, is it true, spell checked, proof read, accurate and useful?
Lots of content is of no use if its all wrong !
Relevance
Similar to quality, but worth considering, you can fill a site with
lots of content, that is clear and of good quality but be careful not
to go off on a tangent. Readers get confused if the content is poorly
focused and while a site may be about cars, its too easy to end up
with articles about boats, holidays etc ? keep focused.
This is maybe more important for search engines, they assign weights
to websites ? like the Google page ranking, and put the highest first
in the results, so relevant content is vital, 20 pages of tight,
focused info will beat 200 pages of rambling off topic chatter.
Meta tags
A throw back from the early days of the web and often overlooked,
metatags are an abbreviated version of your site purely there for
search engines, they confirm the topic, highlight areas of interest,
tell search engines what key phrases you want to be indexed under and
a host of other information. A relatively easy fix, that needs to be
very carefully crafted to work properly for you. Tags you need to
include are Title, Author , Description and Keywords as a minimum. The
actual content needs to match content, and search terms used.
Keyword analysis
After you have added all your content you need to check that it is
about the right things from a search engines point of view, It used to
be that you literally had to write for search engines not people.
While this is no longer needed you do need to keep an eye on keyword
density, weights, repetitions and a whole bunch of other factors to
ensure your site is running at its optimal level and not giving out
the wrong messages, a technical challenge, but one that is worth the
effort.
Meta continued
Step 1, decide on the keywords you want to be found under.
In an ideal world you would then write content based around these
words ( and phrases ? up to 3 words ). once the page is written you
need to look at the text by using a keyword analyser. The page it self
needs to be as big as possible, and at least 500 words as a minimum.
Analyse the keywords in your page, and look at the ones that are
reported as being between 3% and 9% of your content, and rewrite the
content if you need to, these are the ones that the search engines
will consider your page as being about, also remember that keywords in
heading tags ( H1 and H2 ) are considered as important, as is the page
TITLE which again needs to use as many of the page keywords as
possible, while remaining readable.
These words should then be used to make the content for the KEYWORD
tag, and add a few that are relevant but not on the page ? keyword
suggestion tools can help with this.
The DESCRIPTION tag needs to be made up from the page keywords and
phrases with any that are relevant that you couldn't squeeze into your
text added as well. This is typically the snippet of text that some
search engines will display in there results list, and the TITLE tag
would be the heading they give it, however it is the keywords that are
the ones they rank you with.
Broken Links
It is amazing how many sites have bits that don't work, links that are
dead or point to the wrong place. Check all of them, and fix them.
Nothing is more off putting for a reader than clicking on something
that doesn't work.
Alt text
Every image on your site needs to have a text alternative, so if
people are looking on a text only browser, they get some idea what was
supposed to be there, but also search engines know what the picture is
about. Once in place an image intensive page suddenly gets a whole
load of text content, people searching for images will find your site
and your ratings will grow .
Link titles / names
Every link on your site, and links you get pointing to your site will
be analysed by search engines, and they take into account the wording
of the actual link. So two links one saying Click Here, the other
saying ? information on widget polishing, will get very different
treatment, it adds more content, and more importantly adds weight to
the LANDING page, so if you can get 20 sites to link to you with ?
information on widget polishing as the actual words on the link? the
search engines will regard the LANDING page as being about widget
polishing. So better results, and more traffic
There are other areas, and things you can do. From seeding forums,
adding Froogle feeds, Google site maps and taking part in Google
answers but these wont help until you have the basics fixed. |
