SEO Tips - SEO Basics (Tip Sheet 1)

What is "SEO" (Search-Engine Optimization)?


Getting Visitors

Makers of web sites often tend to focus solely on what their site looks like. That ignores a crucial fact: how nice your site looks doesn't matter if no one goes there to see it. Putting it another way, sites need visitors.

Where do visitors come from? They come from many places, but by far the greatest share, the overwhelming majority, come from finding your site listed in the results of a search they have done using a "search engine". There are many search engines, but the 800-pound gorilla of the field, for now anyway, is Google. Most new visitors to your site will arrive from finding it listed on a Google search for some word or phrase. (But Yahoo and MSN are working to climb into the picture.)

Study after study shows that when people want to find information on the internet, they look by searching, and--the crucial point--they rarely if ever look past the first 10 or 20 results found for their search. (Google by default returns 10 results a page, while Yahoo returns 20.)

The conclusion is obvious: we want our web sites to place as high as possible on search-results lists: ideally in the top 10, and at least in the top 20. If they don't, we are scrounging for visitor traffic; we won't have none--we may have a fair bit--but that traffic will be as nothing compared to what it would be if we were placing in the top 10.

Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process--the art, to be fair--of doing things to and about web sites so that they are most likely to place high in search-engine results lists. (The term SERP is common for "Search-Engine Results Placement", and I will use it hereafter.)


"Keyword Phrases"

You may have noticed a logical gap in the brief discussion above: we want to be found in the top 10 or 20 on a search . . . but a search for--what? The answer to that is critically important.

If you have a site on, let's say, vegetable gardening, people doing searches might find you listed under any of a huge number of possible search words or phrases: vegetable gardening, vegetables, gardening, cucumbers, mulch, and the list goes on and on.

It is difficult or impossible to "optimize" a site for a large number of diverse terms. Thus, SEO relies on optimizing a site for maximum SERPs on one or a few phrases; those phrases are referred to as your "keyword phrases" or, for short, just "your keywords".

It is thus blindingly obvious that selecting the right keyword phrases is vital to you: it is the ground on which all your actual SEO effort will stand. If you put in a ton of work optimizing your site for the wrong keywords, you are largely wasting your efforts. What good will it do overall traffic to your hypothetical vegetable-gardening site to place #3 on a search for scorzonera?

Picking good keyword phrases is partly an art, but, nowadays, mostly a science. That is so because there are simple tools freely available on line that will tell you how often any arbitrary phrase you want to try actually is searched for (typically on a "searches per day" basis), and, moreover, will suggest other related phrases and show how often they are searched for. You can then, by trying some of the much-searched-for suggestions, eventually discover what exact phrases relevant to your site are the ones people actually use most when they search for such information.

One excellent example of such a tool is Digital Point's Keyword Suggestion Tool. As an example, if you enter growing vegetables into that tool, you will see that that phrase is used as a search entry about 80 to 95 times a day (the tool reports from two different monitoring services that give slightly different results, as noted and explained by Digital Point); but if you then try vegetable gardening, you see that that phrase is used 416 to 434 times a day. While the tool suggests other, related phrases, you can't count on it to come up with every possible one--and, in fact, in that example, neither term showed the other as an alternative. Moreover, vegetable garden is used even more often than vegetable gardening. So the moral is that you have to think and try, and think and try, and think and try.

Now if you were ignorant of the existence of such a tool, you might have just decided to use, say, home vegetable gardens as your keyword phrase: after all, it's "in the neighborhood", so to speak. But that phrase is only searched for from 5 to 17 times a day! The lesson is do your homework. Selecting your keywords is the most important decision you will make in your SEO work, so take the time to get it right the first time.

(Obviously, those numbers were current on some one particular day; they will doubtless vary from day to day, but equally probably by verylittle.)

Courtesy of Digital Point, you can even try their tool from right here (this will take you to the Digital Point site for the results: use your browser's Back button, repeatedly if necessary, to return here):

Get Suggestions For Phrase:

Brought to you by Digital Point Solutions

There is one more important keywords principle: different keywords for different pages. Many webmasters naturally think of their site's main or "front" page as being their site, and concentrate 100% of their efforts on getting people to visit that page. That is a major mistake. You do indeed want to concentrate on getting new visitors to that page, as the natural gateway to your site--but do not let that focus lead you to forget that you don't have a one-page site, and visitors can and will reach your site through other of its pages as well.

Putting that another way, you need to optimize every site page individually. If you have a site on home vegetable-gardening, you will have visitors who are looking for information on scorzonera find your site through your page on that undeservedly little-known vegetable; others will find your page on colored plastic mulches; and so on. That, in turn, means that you need to take care to select keywords individually for every page of your site. Ranking #3 for searches on scorzonera is, after all, worth something to you: you get a new visitor who, you hope (and work for) will then visit the rest of your site. So you optimize your "front page" for your site's main overall theme, and you optimize your "scorzonera" page for scorzonera.


"On-Site" SEO

Search-Engine Optimization has two utterly separate components: on-site efforts, and off-site efforts; "off-site" efforts consists in getting links to your site's pages, and we will return to that phase later.

"On-site" SEO has to do with the things you have under your direct control: the contents of your site pages. While opinions vary, many believe that on-site SEO is less important than off-site SEO; on the other hand, it remains of some real importance, and it is the aspect that you have 100% control over.

Search-engine companies are fanatic about keeping secret the "algorithms" (formulas, you might say) they use to assign SERPs. Nonetheless, over time, from experience and from technical papers originating from search professionals, certain principles have emerged. Some are almost universally accepted in the SEO community, for some there are divergent opinions, and some are just far-out theories. Experts make respectable incomes by their uses of these principles, and it behooves the novice to acquaint herself or himself with the places on the web where legitimate experts discuss and disclose their particular beliefs.

(Surprisingly, the real--as opposed to soi-disant--SEO experts are almost to a one willing to share a large portion of their knowledge; that, I suppose, is because they know that there's quite a difference between reading a cookbook by an expert cook and being an expert cook, so their positions are secure even if they disclose some of their "secrets".)

A few such places are--

--but there are plenty more. Do yourself a favor and search for them.

But if "Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult" (Hippocrates), some few generally accepted premises are worth repeating here, as a prelude to what you can find when you dig.

Title It Right

Probably the biggest single factor on any one site page affecting that page's SERPs is the title of the page. A page's "title" is the entry in the <title></title> line up near the top of that page. Search engines rightly assume that the title should tell a great deal about the topic of the page. It's your SEO job to assure that it does.

It is essential that a page's title contain that page's keywords, in the right order. It can contain other words, but the fewer the better. (And remember that a page's title is what will show in the "Title Bar" of visitors' browsers.)

One way to get an education in titling is to think of a few fairly popular terms, do a search on each, see what comes up #1 and #2 and #3 for each, and examine the titles of those pages. Do that for a while for a variety of search terms and you'll get the general drift.

Name It Right

Even the actual names of your pages deserve careful consideration. (A page's "name" here is what you use to find it as part of its overall URL: for example, this page's name is seo-tips-1.shtml.) Sites with pages named things like rjfig.html or dinfo.html are not telling anyone--not their visitors, not search-engine robots--what those pages are about. Yes, the 'bots look at lots of things (such as the page titles, as we just noted), but every last bit helps. Try to get each page's keywords, or at least some of them, into the actual filename of that page; if you can't, at least make the names of meaningful words.

Use hyphens to separate distinct words in page names; do not use underscores. It is widely believed that Google (just for one) will easily understand "seo-tips" as the two words "seo" and "tips", but may not understand "seo_tips" in the same way. That is not a certainty, but why take a needless risk? (And don't leave blank spaces in page filenames: yes, you can do it and get away with it under many operating systems, but, again, why risk problems needlessly?) Nor should you run words together: some believe that Google could understand "seotips", but--all together now--why take needless risks?

Build It Right

Search robots are almost universally believed to "read" web-site pages like humans read books: left to right, top to bottom. But remember--search-engine robots are reading your HTML, not your visible page. That's critical, because many web pages have a mass, often a large mass, of "invisible" text at or near their tops--scripts, meta tags, the whole lineup of The Usual Suspects. It can be many, many, many lines of HTML on a poorly designed page before one gets to the very first thing that will actually be visible to someone looking at the page in a browser.

The SEO downside of that derives from the search-bots' natural "belief" that the higher on a page a term occurs, the more important it is, and vice-versa. If a search-engine robot has to go through a third of a page's full length to find a bit of text that the page designer thinks of as significant, the robot will not find that text terribly significant, even if it's the first line that a visitor views on-screen. Don't get lost in your pages' screen appearance: learn to see your pages like a searchbot does.

Obviously, the chief consequence of such "seeing" is the realization that you should do everything in your power to minimize the amount of material of any kind--visible on a browser screen or not--that is not rich in textual relevance to a page yet that appears above material that is relevant (and preferably rich in uses of your keywords for that page).

Organize It Right

The HTML "headers" (<h1>, <h2>, and so on down to <h6>) exist to allow webmasters to coherently organize their pages. They are not, and should never be used as, mere font enhancers.

They should be used as intended: to provide an organizational "skeleton" that your actual text fleshes out. (It is, incidentally, wise to pick distinct colors for each heading's text--the title text, that is, not the body text!--and use those uniformly; that can be tricky if you insist on using background colors or images that vary widely from page to page of your site, which is one reason such varied backgrounds are a poor idea.)

Search-engine robots may use headers in various ways to help them assemble a "concept" of your page, so it is a wise idea to use headers correctly: don't skip levels. Don't top your page with an <h2>, or put an <h3> under an <h1> with no <h2> between. It might to some extent confuse your visitors (though the size differences are not drastically obvious), but, far worse, could confuse a searchbot. Perhaps the chances are minimal, but, once again, we chant the litany: Why take needless risks?

To exactly what degree searchbots construct outlines is not clear, but what is almost universally agreed is that they give significant "relevance" weight to text in higher-level headers, especially <h1> and <h2> headers; it is thus critical to assure that, to the maximum degree possible, your higher-level headers be keyword-rich (or, ideally, pure keyword). It is common practice to make one's <h1> header exactly duplicate the page's <title>, which assures (or should assure) that that top header is keyword-rich.

You don't want to go to lengths in "stuffing" keywords into header text that will annoy your visitors, but you'd be surprised how far, with a little thought, you can go without looking silly.

Write It Right

The essence of any web page, with rare exceptions (typically illustrations), is the actual body text of that page. For all the "MTV Generation" and "Short Attention Span" stuff, at bottom people take in information by reading words. And searchbots have no other way whatever.

(Needless to say, any images on your pages absolutely, positively must be supplied with <alt="blah blah"> text, and "blah blah" should be as keyword-rich as practicable; remember, searchbots can't see images.)

Obviously, you want to construct your page's text so that it remains as closely relevant to that page's topic (or "theme") as possible. Try not to create pages that ramble over several only loosely connected topics: split such pages up into separate ones so that each has one tight topic. Equally obvious is that you want to reproduce your keywords for that page--preferably your exact keyword phrase--as often as possible without sorely distorting the text.

Here are a few text-related points to consider for SEO purposes:

Tag It Right

"Meta-tags" are those lines in the <head> block of your page, usually but by no means always beginning with <meta. Once upon a time, those were thought to be (and perhaps back then were) the high road to SEO: stuff your <meta name="keywords" tag with multiple repetitions of every conceivable keyword and you'll be #1. It probably never was quite true, and for long now has not been true at all. Google is said to totally ignore the keywords meta tag (though Yahoo apparently reads it--which still doesn't mean that you can spam it).

You can and should, for Yahoo and a few others, put some few, thoughtfully selected keywords (which should, of course, include your true "keywords" as we have been using the term, but which may include some material others besides) directly relevant to a given, particular page in that page's <meta name="keywords" tag.

But the tag to take particular care with, because Google and many others use it, is the <meta name="description" tag. That tag will often be used by search engines as the source of their description of your page in their SERPs. It behooves you to make sure, then, that that tag is a satisfactory, self-contained, fully explanatory description of that page, phrased in a way that will draw the kind of visitors you are seeking for that page to that page. If you do a search, and are scanning the result listings, and are interested in topic X, you want your description to be the one at which the searcher says "Aha! That's what I'm looking for!"

Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that a search engine using that tag for its description will use all of it. Write it so that--within reasonable limits--it can be truncated anywhere and still function tolerably. A frequent recommendation is that the "content=" portion not exceed 255 characters in length, but getting it a little tighter is probably smart. Remember that this tag does two things: it may well be what does (or doesn't) bring visitors from searches, and it further helps the searchbots define your page (which, ultimately, helps you get placed higher up in those searches).

It is extraordinarily common, and extraordinarily foolish, for a web site to be designed with every single page having the same <meta name="description" tag, word for word; the webmaster sweats and groans constructing one ideal for the site as a whole (which, in reality, simply means for the site's front page), then lazily or unthinkingly slaps that same tag across every page. If you are that lazy or foolish, be assured that your pages' SERPs will pay the penalty.

The <meta name="robots" tag with content="index,follow" is commonly included, but--as it is the default robot behavior--it is best omitted, to keep, in however small a way, your "real" text from being pushed farther down the page.

There are several other meta-tags, most rarely used, that you should avoid for the same reason: don't push your real text any farther down the page than absolutely, positively necessary. "Author" and "copyright" and the rest of the amazingly many meta-tags are just useless clutter from an SEO viewpoint. Stick to the necessities.

Code It Right

Every once in a while, in reading a book, we run into a printer's error where, say, two or three lines are stuck in the wrong place. Usually, after a few seconds we can see what's wrong, and what connects to what, and can read the page, but sometimes we never are sure we've read what the author really wrote.

That can happen with HTML, too. Many browsers are remarkably "forgiving" about interpreting HTML that is technically incorrect, and are designed to be pretty "smart" about auto-fixing such defects in their displays. But some code errors are simply beyond them, and we've all seen pages that very, very obviously don't look like their designer could possibly have intended. Yet, we must realize, the designer did look at that page--so her or his browser has "fixing" capabilities different from ours.

That sort of thing is bad enough when inflicted on our poor visitors. It can be a lot worse if we inflict it on search-engine robots. Who knows how "smart" they are or are not at "auto-fixing" defective HTML? More to the point, why try to find out the hard way? There is no excuse in the world for HTML code that is not 100% standards-compliant. When our code is guaranteed standards-compliant, we can sleep soundly, knowing that we cannot be confusing any searchbots. Perhaps the risk of such confounding by non-compliant code is small: so what? How many times do we need to say it? Why take needless risks?

The remedy is absurdly simple: when we have finished up making a page, just submit it to a good third-party code validator. An excellent, fast, free such thing is the w3c page validator, supplied--of course--by the w3c (World-Wide Web Consortium, effectively the web's "governing body"). You can use it for pages already in place on-line, or on pages that so far exist only on your local machine. Do it--and keep doing it: there are no such things as "trivial" page changes.

(It is wise, these days, to move to XHTML, Transitional Version 1.0; eventually, we will all have to move to XHTML, and moving to v. 2.0 will be a bear for those not already at least at 1.0. Converting from standard HTML to XHTML is not terribly difficult, and is a one-time task.)


"Off-Site" SEO

"Off-site" SEO means simply getting links to your site's pages--but "simply" is actually not the right word, for it is not a simple process in any way.

This essay will not go into the various ways in which you can make contact with other web sites and try to get them to link to you: that is a process that is, as Edison once described "genius", 1 percent inspiration and 99% perspiration.

We will, though, look at a few important mechanical matters concerning inbound links to your pages.

Don't Needlessly Water Down Your Backlinks

You will work long and hard to get backlinks. Don't foolishly let some substantial fraction of them be rendered nearly useless by your inaction.

To a search engine,

http://mywonderfulsite.com/dirname/pagename.html

--is not the same page as--

http://www.mywonderfulsite.com/dirname/pagename.html

A backlink to one is not counted by the search engines as a link to the other (or vice versa). You can (and very likely do) have separate listings with, for example, Google, for each URL version of each page of each site you have. (Take a look and see: look for cached versions of some page--and, if there is a distinct cache under each form, Google has that page as two different pages.) And each is treated as a different, distinct page when SERPs are run for an inquiry. That, for SEO purposes, is something from bad to awful.

You cannot reasonably hope to control the exact form in which each and every backlink you achieve will be cast. If you don't take care, you could spend more time running after backlinkers to "correct" their links than in getting new links. That is needless. There are simple ways under your direct control in which you can assure that a link to either form is seen by the search engines (and your visitors) as a link to the form you prefer. (And it doesn't matter which form--with or without a www--you elect to prefer).

The details, and some practical instructions, are in another of these SEO Tips, SEO Tip #3.

Focus on Backlink Anchor Text

A link's "anchor text" is whatever appears on the linker's page as the click-on link. In a link to this page, the words "this page" are that link's "anchor text".

It is almost universally accepted in SEO circles that search engines put a huge emphasis on the anchor text used in backlinks to your site. That emphasis has a very great deal to do with how much a given backlink helps the linked page achieve better SERPs. While the mere existence of a link to your page gives that page some little boost in PR, PR isn't, and doesn't determine, SERPs (I cover that in more detail in SEO Tip #4.) But if you have a site on pets, and within it a section (embodied, say, as a subdirectory) on cats, and within that a page on the Manx cat, a link using "this page" (as in take a look at this page for some first-class info on Manx cats)--well, thanks for nothing. For all that the search engine knows about that link, it could be to a biography of Lily Hitchcock Coit, or an article on exploring Antarctica. Had the linker instead linked with take a look at this page for some first-class info on Manx cats, your page would have received a definite plus in SERPs for "manx cats" (how much of a plus depending on the "authority" of the linking page).

OK, you can't directly control backlink anchor text any more than you can URL formats. But you can at least increase the probabilities by placing on every page of every site a little "To link to this page..." note near the bottom containing both your suggested URL and the suggested anchor text. (There's an example a little farther on in this page.) In short: make it easy for others to link to you.

And, rather obviously, your suggested anchor text had best be as rich as possible (without annoying those who might use it by its length or artificiality) in your keywords for that page.

Calculate Your Attack

While it is true that all backlinks help a page, obviously some help more than others. Your time for pursuing links is finite: budget it wisely. Seek backlinks from the pages with the highest possible PR (Page Rank). Seek especially high-PR pages that are thematically related to yours. Look up PRs page by page. A site that has a PR7 for its "front page" may well have a 500-link PR-3 page for its outgoing links. Try to get links from particular pages that have high PR (there are many places on the web that will assist you in discovering the PR of a given web page), especially if they are legitimately relevant to the page you want a backlink to.

And a sadly necessary last note: when looking to a site for possible backlinks, be sure to check their pages' source code to be sure they don't "hide" outbound links. On some few occasions, it is legitimate to "hide" links from search engines (this very site offers the "Via" toy for that very purpose); but wholesale hiding of most or all of a site's "links" marks a place you need have nothing to do with.

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