Search Engine Optimization - Part 1: The Basics

Photo: DeclanTM

When it comes to web design, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a frequently undervalued skilled. Good SEO practices aren’t just for large corporations competing for the number one spot on Google; SEO is just as important to small Mom and Pop shops investing hard earned money into a website.

Without visibility on a search engine, the growth potential of any website is limited to word of mouth. If you’re a professional blogger, that’s not such a bad thing. But for Mom and Pop’s local bakery, it’s a disastrous plan. A couple hours spent on SEO can make the difference between a smart investment and wasteful spending.

And let’s be honest, spending time optimizing a client’s website isn’t all altruistic. After all, the more people that see your work, the more work you’ll have in the future. Using SEO to increase your own visibility is a no-brainer.

In Search Engine Optimization - Part 1, we’ll cover all the basic SEO knowledge. We’ll begin with what web crawlers can and cannot read, discuss how to expedite the indexing process, and finish with a list of easy to remember rules for moving a site up the search engine ranks. These will cover meta descriptions, meta keywords, headers, titles and all the basic rules that take only a few minutes to learn. Easy to implement, they’ll quickly become a must have on every site.

Understanding How Sites are Indexed

Crawlers, and spiders, and robots… oh my. There are a lot of different names for them out there, but their basic function is to index websites for search engines by following links. I prefer to use the term crawler, but feel free to call them any number of names - just don’t hurt their feelings.

Bad jokes aside, each search engine has its own set of crawlers that go out and index sites, and all of them follow some of the same simple behavior. Below is a short list of their capabilities as well as their shortcomings.

• Crawlers are Server Side Readers Web crawlers can read the results of server side languages. So any content added by languages like PHP and ASP will be indexed as if it was part of the original page.
• Client Side Scripts are in Invisible Ink Unlike server side scripts, web crawlers do not read client side code. Since crawlers follow links, using pure Javascript menus could cause the crawler to miss parts of the site.
• Flash Makes Crawlers Dizzy Just like client side scripting, web crawler’s can not read content inside of Flash.
• Crawlers Don’t Appreciate Art Content contained in images is unreadable. But crawlers can read alt properties inside of any image tags, so always including them is a great idea. And if you’re using images to preserve a font choice for a header, there’s an even better alternative. sIFR loads a font on any Flash compatible browser, preserving the look of the header while also adding the emphasis of the header tags. It also degrades nicely in nonFlash browsers, to boot (I’ll cover more about sIFR later).

Helping Out the Crawlers

Although there’s no way around the crawler limitations, there are a few ways to manipulate the indexing process. Here are a few things worth knowing:

• The No Follow Meta Tag You can include in the site header a meta tag, name=’robots’ content=’noindex, nofollow’, to tell robots not to index the page (noindex) and its links (nofollow). There’s only a few rare cases where you’d want to use this, such as a redirect page. Since only ‘good’ crawlers like site indexers listen to the robots meta tag, it won’t protect your site from malicious ones, such as spam email-list crawlers. Moreover, there’s no reason to put a ‘index, follow’ meta tag, since by default all crawlers will index a site.
• Robots.txt The crawlers can be controlled further by including a robots.txt file in the home directory. It works by telling the crawler which directories to follow, and which to ignore. You can read more about the robots.txt on robotstxt.org. Be aware, you can easily ban crawlers from indexing any of your site with a small typo in the robots.txt, so if you must use it, use it wisely.
• XML Sitemap CreatorThere are a few services out there that will create an XML sitemap of the website for you. With a link to the sitemap, you can insure every page of the site will be found and indexed. Additionally, you can submit a sitemap when you register your site for indexing with a search engine.
• Registering with a Search Engine Although there’s no need to submit your site to the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, its one way to expedite the indexing process.

Optimizing the Site

Now that we’ve covered what a crawler can and can’t do, it’s time to squeeze the most out of the readable content. Here’s some simple rules to live by:

• Most Important Words First Always place the most important words farthest left in a title or header tag. This is not just to get the readers attention, crawlers tend to emphasize leftmost words more (this is debatable, but still good practice).
• Use the Meta Description The Meta Description is what shows up under a search result. Some experts say to leave this out, and let search engines determine their own description. I disagree. This is your chance to stack keywords and not only get higher ranking, but stand out to the searcher. Remember, search engines like Google bold word matches, which can give an edge over competition. Make sure your description is no longer than 160 characters (including spaces), or else the description will cut off, depending on the search engine.
• Meta Keywords are Devalued Meta Keywords used to be the way for sites to tell search engines what their site is about. But crawlers are more advanced now, and these keywords don’t matter much, if at all. Still, it doesn’t hurt to include a short list of 8-10 terms(either use spaces or commas to separate words, you don’t need both). Focus more on using specific key phrases in the content of the site, especially in title and header tags.
• Separate Code Layers Separating the style (css) and the client-side code (javascript) from the content allows web crawlers to read your site content without having to separate everything itself. But then again, you’re already practicing this one, right?
• Stack the Title Tag with Keywords Don’t just write “Bob’s Bakery | Welcome” on the index page. Write “Fresh Baked Dough, Great Customer Service, Affordable Prices at Bob’s Bakery”. Stacking keywords not only helps out search engine rankings, it focuses readers on what’s important about the site.
• Use One h1 Tag per PageThis should be the most important phrase on the current page(such as the title of a blog entry, or the Contact Us page). And try to integrate keywords as much as possible.
• Use h2 for section headers There’s some research that says crawlers pay the most attention to h1, then h2, then drops off sharply at h3-h5. This may or may not be true, but regardless using the next number if line for the second most important entry is a good idea.
• Always use Alts for Images This includes using img tags for important images instead of using CSS background property.
• Use sIFR instead of Images for Headers As discussed earlier, sIFR uses Flash to load text in a specific font, even if the viewer doesn’t have the font installed. The technology degrades well, showing the default CSS styling if Flash is disabled in the viewer’s browser. Check out the sIFR project page and the wikipedia entry.
• At Least 250 Words Per Page Search engines penalize sites full of links with no content. Avoid being deemed a fake link site by placing at least 250 words on each page, especially if theres a lot of links.

So there’s the basics. Armed with these quick and easy rules, websites will rank better than before, which is bound to increase click-through rates.

And although these basic rules do not make you an SEO expert, there an important foundation and a great start. In Part II we’ll start to cover more advanced SEO techniques, starting with Keyword Optimization. Be sure to check back soon.