AN INTRODUCTION TO SEO

Search Engine Optimization, though an integral part of developing a complete web presence, is something that’s often overlooked by both web design companies and their clients alike. This article is meant to serve as an introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it will be followed with a 2nd article which contains a basic primer on how to go about properly optimizing a site. My intended audience for this first article is the savvy consumer who is trying to educate himself or herself, and the follow-up article will endeavor to help those design/development firms who are only just breaking into the world of SEO.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing a site’s ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Ideally, you want your business to appear as the first result to someone who is searching for a product or service you provide to your customers. For example, if you own a vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia, it would significantly increase your restaurant’s exposure if your website were the first result for “vegetarian restaurant Philadelphia” on Google. This type of positioning is the goal of search engine optimization.

Organic Results vs. Paid Results

It is important to understand the difference between organic search results and paid search results. Organic search results are selected and positioned by the search engine itself, with no external bias toward one site over another. With organic searching, the order of results is determined exclusively by the relevance of the site to the user’s specific query, as determined by the search engine’s internal algorithms. Search engine optimization endeavors to “educate” the search engine about a site so that the site will be seen as relevant for certain queries, and therefore given better positioning in the results. This “most relevant site first” method of ordering search results is in sharp contrast to pay-per-click, in which the highest bidder for a given search query is given preference. However, pay-per-click results are generally shown on separate parts of the screen from the main organic results, usually at the top of the window or in a sidebar labeled “sponsored links”. Although there are compelling reasons to launch a pay-per-click campaign as part of your online marketing plan, this article focuses exclusively on organic search optimization.

Won’t the search engines just find my site on their own?

Modern search engines are very adept at crawling the web and creating a comprehensive index that contains every website they come across. However, the algorithms used by search engines take into account many different factors when determining where to position a site, and if your site doesn’t measure up when it comes to some of the more important factors, you will end up buried among thousands or millions of other sites.

Search engines have one goal: to return the most relevant results to a user’s query in order to help them find what they are looking for. Why is it, then, that if you do in fact own a vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia, your website can still get buried on page 29 for the exact query “vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia”? One reason for this apparent discrepancy is that search engines don’t view websites the way a person does. When a search engine downloads a web page, it sees only the markup code that was used to create the site - it doesn’t see visual elements like graphics or page layout. If the site hasn’t been optimized, more often than not, the search engine’s back-end view of the site offers little indication of what content is important and what the primary focus of the site is. These search engine “spiders” - the algorithms that do the actual searching and indexing - can make a good guess as to what the site is about, but without a clear understanding of why it would be a great result for a specific search query, the site will end up in a mediocre position at best.

SEO TOOLS

2. DN Fame

This is a nice tool that will get you a lot of basic analysis done like web rankings, traffic, domain info etc. Does less of SEO but more of domain popularity.

3. The Reaction Engine

A nifty tool that will do a lot more than what you’d expect. Analysis content, code, off site metrics etc and suggests changes/improvements with an overall score. Good one for fixing code errors.

4. SEO Header Checker Tool

This is an interesting one, it doesn’t check your onpage SEO metrics like many SEO Analysis tools do, instead it checks for header statuses. canonical issues, Redirect issues etc can be detected here

SEO TOOLS

W3 OPTIMISER
If you’re looking for running some quick health checks on your site with some basic SEO analysis done, here are some tool to the rescue !W3 optimiser Generates a one page report giving you a comprehensive report of basic SEO checks.

HOW TO MEASURE THE QUALITY OF A LINK PAGE

Spam O Meter

This is yet another free seo analysis tool that will check your website for spam. Basically it scans the outgoing links to see if you have “spam” in there. Also lists out the good and bad, with a nice meter that shows where you score – on the spam o meter.

10 TIPS FOR BETTER SEARCH ENGINE CRAWLING OF YOUR WEBSITE

Even if you have a kickass site, sometimes you have to wait for ages to get some pages indexed and crawled on Google. Why does this happen ? I’ve found many people complain that after building a great site, and doing the standard chores, waiting so long for the results doesn’t make any sense. Certain things just don’t happen as planned. Like certain pages on a site, doesn’t get indexed and if indexed doesn’t get the right visibility on the search engines. Strange.

I can probably attribute all these problems to a couple of SEO factors. Let me try and explain them below.

1. Set a sitemap, with the right priorities

Setting a proper sitemap solves most of the problems often. But don’t take this lightly as we have many automated plugins to do the job. Many a times, the automated plugins need good tweaking to ensure that they have the right settings for your site. I have written several posts about sitemaps, like this one, check it out.

2. Publish articles regularly in a predictable fashion

This is not a way to “control” how often the bots visit you. Google has its own algorithm to find out when it should visit you, but publishing more articles in a regular fashion sure does give Google clues on what your posting frequency is like. Nothing wrong in publishing articles in random, but I’d suggest you keep it pretty much in a predictable fashion so we make the process easy.

3. Link well contextually and often between posts

Cross linking between pages contextually is a great way to make sure that the bots visit all those pages. Contextual links are given more importance probably than any other link on the site, so make use of them.

4. Keep the directory structure simple

If you have a self designed website, make sure you keep the directory structure simple and not too deep. Having more directories to crawl will make the job difficult for the bots. Keep it simple.

5. Block the unnecessary pages with proper SEO techniques

Along with making sure that all the pages are crawled, also make sure that the ones you don’t need to show up in the search results are blocked. (Like the TOS page.) You could use the Meta Noindex and the robots.txt exclusion protocol to get things done.

6. Make the navigation bar simple and accessible

Often I see websites with complex, fancy navigation bar annoying. I mean, it doesn’t have to be fancy to impress your visitors right ? You could use classy CSS styling to get elegant looks and still impress them. The problem with fancy navigation bars are that they often do more harm than good like not allowing proper crawling of the pages linked. There are various techniques you can use to make the navigation bar attractive and still allow smooth crawling, employ them.

7. Practice deep linking

Always practice deep linking (you shouldn’t be having a deep structure in the first place.) if you have a big and deep directory structure. Do not miss out linking to any directory/pages. Use clever linking strategy to link all the directories/categories and pages each other. If possible link to all the main category indexes right from the homepage.

8. Make use of proper anchor texts and internal text links

Linking to pages with images and other elements may also result in poor crawling of those pages. Use proper anchor texts to share the contextual factor among your pages and directories.

9. Keep the URLs simple and easy to remember

Confusing URLs are neither good for Google bots as well as visitors. Google bots love simple, meaningful URLs and visitors love URLs with recall value and those are easy to remember. If you don’t want to screw up things, keep the URLs simple and easy to remember (both for bots and humans). P.S – Google does not have any problems with seemingly confusing or meaningless URLs. They still make out the content from the page, however having meaningful URLs are a definite plus.

10. Use the homepage very well

The homepage as you know is likely to gather the most link juice and importance compared to other pages on the site. (This is just a general observation, but if a page gathers more links to it, it could also get more authority and link juice than the homepage.) Use the homepage well, and add more links to the inner pages from it, so they share the authority.

Essentially, factors like how fast to index, how often to index and how deep to index are decided by the search engines. But to a certain level you can control their crawling speed and frequency. The points above are good pointers to this, hope they helped you.