Search Engine Optimization | Tech Comm Student

Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category.

Book Review: Search Engine Optimization

8th January 2010, 08:00 am

SEO: Your Visual Blueprint For Effective Internet Marketing

I recently ordered Kristopher Jones’s new book on how to optimize websites for search engine effectiveness. His introduction includes a brief history of SEO as well as an overview of general tips for success. Afterward, I was surprised to find that the next 284 pages basically consist of explaining how exactly to accomplish his given advice; You won’t find much theory here. Each topic is clearly labeled in the upper left corner, with an average topic length of about two pages.

Certainly this makes the book easy to pick up for quick referencing, but seems to lack the depth that I had expected from a book so thick. And while I understand this to be a newcomers guide to search engine optimization, some of Jones’s advice includes the idea of throwing money at a problem to have someone else do the job for you.

But what Jones does do well is introduce an absolute beginner to the most basic concepts of web design and SEO and then shares some more advanced techniques to those of us with a little more experience. His examples are very clear, and he provides in many cases, numerous ways of approaching an objective. Some of the topics he covers include: creating a meta robot tag, using text modifiers, optimizing your website for multiple browsers, designing a sitemap, re-writing URLs, and utilizing redirects. He also spends some time venturing into creating communities on the web and publishing successful blog posts, finding suitable linking partners, and submitting your articles to directories. While some of this information may seem overly redundant to an experienced web user, he presents useful advice even for the lesser novice among us.

I do recommend this book if you are just starting your web publication journey, or perhaps have a basic understanding of SEO, but feel that you lack the knowledge or skills to be effective. There is a lot of information out on the web regarding search engine optimization, but if you want to be sure you’re receiving advice from a trustworthy source, this book might be an important one to keep close by while you develop your online content.

8 Ways To Easily Increase Page Rank

5th January 2010, 06:14 pm

As technical communications people, we are often responsible for creating and maintaining company websites. Most of the time we will be working with already well established sites on the web. But what if your company wishes to create a new site to attract a different type of customer? How will you be sure that the pages you create will be easily found on search engine results, and thereby greatly increase web page traffic? The answer is search engine optimization.

Increasing Page Rank On Day One

Research has shown through multiple studies that very few people will spend their time cycling deeper through search engine results to access a web page. A very strong majority of people looking for information will click on the links that show up on the first through third pages. This leaves us with hundreds of thousands of web pages that are almost never visited through a search engine.

When a search engine robot crawls across the web evaluating pages and their relevancy toward a certain subject, each page is ranked in order of this perceived relevancy. The greater the rank, the more likely users will be to find your page higher up towards page one in search engine results. Below is a list of 7 basic, but necessary ways to increase your ranking on the day your website is published.

Name Your Web Page

Have you ever come across a book without a title? Of course not! How would anyone reference it? Likewise, it only makes sense to also name each of your web pages in a way that describes what visitors will find within the content. Open your XHTML file and place the following between your <head> and </head> tags:

<title>This Is My Descriptive Page Title</title>

Remember that this is the title that users will see in the search engine results page.

Choose Targeting Keywords

It is important to recognize that a Google search for “pet stores” will turn up significantly more results than a search for “pet stores in Minnesota.” Knowing this, the chance that our new website will be able to initially compete with the greater competition for the “pet stores” keyword is very low. Instead, opt to target your visitors with more specific words or phrases. Depending on how competitive your website topic is, you may wish to assign your keyword phrases as long as three or even four words long!

Telling search engines which words you wish to describe each of your web pages with is quite simple. Once again, place the following between your <head> and </head> tags:

An excellent free service you may wish to use is Google’s Keyword Tool, allowing you to search out the competition for phrases related to your website in addition to the search volume for that phrase. Remember that keyword phrases are separated by a comma, and that each of your pages need their own set of keywords to accurately describe its content!

Write a Web Page Description

The page description is what will show up when a user comes across your link in the search engine results. We have 160 characters to try to convince people to visit our site, so let’s make it good! Your description should utilize some of your keywords while being simultaneously concise. If you were to view this site’s homepage description, it read:

Each of your pages should have its own description, describing the content on the page. Place your description between your <head> and </head> tags.

Name Your Page Files Appropriately

Search engines are always trying to find relevancy when viewing your pages. If you name your files in a way that reinforces your keywords, your pages are more likely to be associated with your targeted subject. An example for a technical writing webpage would be to change “reallycoolpage.html” to a more descriptive “technicalwriting.html.” This method also applies to any images or links you may have on your pages.

Validate Your Web Pages

A correctly scripted web page is definitely easier for search engine robots to traverse, often resulting in the potential for a better page rank. Check out these excellent, free HTML/ XHTML and CSS validators! You can read more about the importance of validation here.

XHTML Validation , CSS Validation

Use Header Tags

The use of the header tag (such as <h1>My Heading</h1>) tells search engines that the words inside the tag should be weighed with more importance when determining how a page should rank. With the inclusion of CSS, we can create header tags that fit the theme of our website.

Design A Sitemap

A sitemap is similar to a table of contents in that they both direct a visitor to their preferred location. A sitemap on the web is a single web page that categorically links to all of your other pages on the domain. Search engines reward websites with a sitemap by more easily finding all of your new content and indexing them for people to find through search queries. You can find a free XML sitemap generator here.

Use No-Follow Links

Creating links to other pages that may not be closely related to your site’s content should, for the sake of your page rank, contain the HMTL no-follow attribute. Again, robots are always trying to piece together the relevancy puzzle, and if they notice that a website about writing is linked to a website about animals, an inconsistency is noted and your page rank could be lowered. View the following example showing how to use no-follow:

<a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Example Page</a>.