search engine optimisation
By Dave Burton, MD, DB-Status Computer Services Ltd.
We’re contacted every so often by clients asking about search engine positioning and optimisation. Most of the time the client has been approached by an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) company trying to talk them into paying lots of money for search engine optimisation. The SEO firms promise “guaranteed top results” and “submission to 500,000 search engines and directories”.
It seems that a substantial number of clients with websites are regularly contacted by companies of this kind, and sadly the more gullible are tempted by promises of top results and submission to everything”. Any sane business owner would want their site to rank highly in their industry...it's only natural.
Basically what I'm trying to do here is just let you know my understanding of search engines and the best way to gain high rankings. Please bear in mind that this is written in early 2007, so things may change. Also I am not including paid-for search in this discussion - rather we are attempting to significantly increase our chances of being found in the 'natural' rankings - those that the search engines choose to list as results based on the relevancy of your webpage content in relation to a search term. I may be giving some 'secrets' of our craft away here, as we have achieved very high rankings on the major search engines for numerous clients, but I feel this is all realtively common-sense, and there's nothing here that you can't find elsewhere on the web.
Now I don't want to disparage all SEO consultants out there - they're not all bad, indeed there are many reputable firms in the business. But if someone promises ***guaranteed top results***, ***submission to 500 000 search engines and directories***, ***instant results*** or ***permanent top positions*** then please be skeptical - this person is quite likely trying to pull a fast one. It's impossible to guarantee number one result unless they happen to own Google or suchlike, or if the top listing is 100% unique to your ranked page of course.
Search engine optimisation has a lot to do with the other efforts we put in when building a website - in other words, accessibility, usability, and high quality, semantic code, i.e. the principles of good web design. The very fact that a DB-Status website is built with these considerations in mind lends itself extraordinarily well to making your site more accessible and usable for humans, and by using valid, semantic markup, we also make it more attractive to search engine robots.
Consider the guidelines I describe here a basic level of SEO – try this first, and if you’re still not getting the results you want, you may want to look into getting help from a reputable search engine optimisation firm, such as ourselves. If you contact someone regarding optimising your site, ask them what they will do for your site. If they suggest any kinds of shady methods, be very careful. They might get you penalised or even banned from search engine indexes. On the other hand, if their advice includes what I’m suggesting here, they will probably do a good job.
Sorry, no shortcuts
Unfortunately there is no way to get immediate high-ranking results within the search engines - this is something that needs to be understood from the off. Rather, expect some decision-making and hard work and results will happen.
You will also need patience. Things won't happen overnight. When we work on improving the search engine positioning of a client’s site, we always offer sound advice, but also add the caveat that we simply can't turn things around overnight, but we can in the fullness of time.
Ensure the content is of high quality
Probably the single most important thing you need to do if you want to be found on the web. We can build a website that is perfect for search engines, but the words on the page need real consideration. We offer access to the 'metatags' to all clients through our Content Management System, so that page titles, descriptions and tags can be updated and kept in line with page content. This is vital for good SEO. Bear in mind a page title shoul only carry around 60-90 characters, while the longer, and non-appearing description should be around 150 characters. They should both balance with the page content - i.e. be closely related to what's on the page - and the page content should be well-written - which means factually and grammatically correct. And whatever type of website you want, you have to create the right impression for your potential audience, which helps the serach engines rank your site. Ideally the content needs to be unique and/or specific enough to appeal to people you class as potential customers/clients/visitors etc.
Good content brings people back, and if they come back once they may return more often - but they don't necessarily want to read the same things. If they have a website, then people who like your content will eventually link to your site, and the more links you can create coming in to your site, the better. This is becoming a vital part of SEO, especially if those links are from highly ranked sites.
If your content can be kept updated and fresh by adding new content regularly, you give visitors a good reason to come back. Search engine robots will also visit your site more often once they notice that you update regularly, which means that any new content you add will be indexed quicker.
When we build a website, we don't necessarily take on the job of creating content. It isn't really the responsibility, nor the bastion of the web designer. If the client has good copywriting skills, they can prepare content themselves...although we encourage clients to use a third-party copywriter, as these people write good copy for a living. Whatever, we try to ensure our clients are aware that they can’t expect consistent high rankings without good content.
Think about spelling
If you write in English, you are probably aware of the differences in spelling between American and British English. Colour vs. color, optimisation vs. optimization, etc. There are also many words that are commonly misspelled (this goes for all languages).
I don’t like the idea of intentionally misspelling words, since it goes against my definition of “good content”. If words with multiple spellings or commonly misspelled words are an important part of your content, i.e. keywords, consider adding a glossary or similar to include the most common spelling variations on the page.
Write descriptive page titles
By making your page titles simple, yet descriptive and relevant, you make it easier for search engines to know what each page is about, and people scanning through search results can quickly determine whether your document contains what they are looking for. The page title is also what is used to link to your site from search result listings.
Because of this, the "title" element is one of the most important elements on a page. Some argue that it is the most important element. Our content management system allows you to amend your page title, but be careful - there will be some amount of thought already gone into the process.
When it comes to the order of the text in the title element, I’ve found that the following works well:
Document title | Section name | Site or company name
That is probably one of the best formats for accessible title texts. Again, accessibility and SEO work together.
Whatever you do, don’t use the same title text for all documents. Doing so will make it much harder for search engines, people browsing through search results, and site visitors to quickly find out what the document is about.
So make sure your page title is descriptive of the page in question - don't just say 'About Us', say 'About Us | England's Best Butchers | Wilson's of Leeds' then fill the page with relevant information.
Use real headings
Use the h1 - h6 elements for headings. Using graphics for headings may let you use any typeface you want, but search engines aren’t going to pay much attention. Even if you (as is required) use the alt attribute to specify alternate text for heading images, that text will not be anywhere near as important as real text in a heading element. In my experience, this is true even if the images are inside heading elements. If you know otherwise, please tell.
If you cannot use real text, look at the various image or Flash replacement techniques that are available. Be aware that there may be a tiny risk involved in doing so. Since image replacement techniques involve hiding text, it is theoretically possible for search engines to penalise you. Currently that risk seems very slim, but don’t say I didn’t warn you if it does happen.
Use search engine friendly URLs
Avoid dynamically generated URLs that use a query string to let the server know which data to fetch from a database. Search engine robots may have difficulties with this kind of URL – they may stop at the question mark and not even look at the query string.
Use search engine friendly, human readable URLs instead. This will help both your ranking and your users. I’ve seen incredible improvements in search engine results from just changing the URL scheme of a site.
Modifying and rewriting a site’s URLs can be a little tricky, and some CM systems make it more difficult than others to implement. It is worth the effort though. A couple of resources to help you make your URLs better:
Get linked to
There is no easy and sustainable way to solve this one except for – you guessed it – providing good content. Incoming links are very, very important for SEO. They are also possibly the hardest part of SEO to implement.
However, in my experience incoming links are less important the more specific and unique your content is. As an example, a couple of our clients are in what you may call niche businesses. They don’t have lots of sites linking to them, yet they started ranking very well in search engines after I had applied the knowledge I’m sharing here to their sites.
Use valid, semantic, lean, and accessible markup
Most web browsers have advanced functionality to decipher the tag soup mess that is used instead of HTML on most current sites. You can’t rely on search engine robots to do that to the same extent. Validate your HTML and avoid presentational markup – use as lean and clean markup as possible. By increasing your content-to-markup ratio, you make your site faster and more attractive to search engines.
High quality markup will help boost your rankings.
Accessibility is also very important. Making your site more accessible to vision impaired humans will also help search engine robots find their way around it. Remember, Google is blind, so even if you don’t care about blind people using your site (which you should), you’ll still want it to be accessible. This means that you should use real headings, paragraphs, and lists, and avoid using anything that may interfere with search engine spiders.
Flash and JavaScript are fine, as long as they aren’t required to navigate your site and to access vital information. Don’t hide your content inside Flash files or behind funky JavaScript navigation. Browse your site in Lynx, and with graphics, CSS, JavaScript, and Flash off. If that gives you problems, it is likely to cause problems for search engine spiders.
Submit carefully
Often slightly overrated, submitting a site to directories and search engines can be useful, especially if the site is new and hasn’t already been picked up by Google and others. Go ahead and submit it to Google. It won’t hurt, but most likely Google will find you anyway.
Two directories that may be worth submitting to are Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. Be patient – it will probably take several weeks for your submissions to be processed, unless you pay for them to list you. Indeed the Open Directory Project is less useful these days, as there is such a backlog of websites waiting to be checked by this human-led ranking method.
Don’t try to fool the search engines
Don’t use cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, alt text spamming or other dubious methods. They may work for a short while if you’re lucky, but you risk being penalised or even banned from search engines, which you do not want.
Search engines want their results to be accurate, and they don’t like it when people try to trick them. Just don’t do it.
Avoid using frames
While it is possible to provide workarounds that allow search engine robots to crawl frame based sites, frames will still cause problems for the people who find your site through search engines.
When somebody follows the link from a search result listing to a frame based site, they will land on an orphaned document, outside of its parent frameset. This is very likely to cause confusion, since in many cases vital parts of the site, like navigational links, will be absent.
Some sites use JavaScript or server side scripting to redirect anyone trying to load a document outside of its parent frameset to the site’s home page. This is a very user hostile thing to do, and it definitely does not help the people visiting your site. Just lose the frames. They are bad for usability anyway.
Be careful with browser detection
If you need to use some kind of browser detection, make sure that it doesn’t break when a search engine spider (or any unknown user agent) comes along. If the spiders can’t get in, you won’t be found. I’ve seen this happen on the sites of fairly large companies.
Don’t waste your time on meta tags
Most search engines don’t place any great deal of value on the contents of meta tags anymore. They have been used way too much by spammers. I’d suggest using the meta description element, but that’s all. Keywords won’t hurt, but they will rarely help either, so they are generally not worth the effort. 5 minutes spent on keywords is 4 minutes too many.
Some search engines use the contents of the meta description element to describe your site in their search result listings, so if possible, make its contents unique and descriptive for every document.
Right. But that was far too much for me to read.
Ok, then. The ultra-short guide to SEO: add quality content regularly and make sure your site is well-built.
What next?
Like I stated at the beginning of this article, these are basic guidelines for SEO. There is much more than this that can be done to increase your site’s visibility in search engines, but following the advice I’ve given here is a good start that, in my experience, will get you very far.
