Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

In order to understand SEO, it is necessary to understand the business model of the search engines. Search engines make the vast majority of their money from paid advertising. In order for companies to pay them for advertising, there have to be people to see the ads (i.e., there must be people using the search engine). In order for people to use the search engine, the organic results must actually be useful to the people doing the searching. That is to say, what the search engine wants is for the first page showing up in organic search to be the most useful page for the person doing the searching. To that extent, if your page that you want to show up first is, in fact, the most useful, then your goals and those of the search engine are aligned.

So, what does that mean for you? It means that the two single most important things you can do for SEO are

  • have good content; and,
  • have good web design

Let’s take a look at these two in a little more detail. First, what constitutes “good” content? This varies quite a bit, depending on the nature of your business and the web page in question. However, a good rule of thumb is to think about whether or not you would consider it good content. Now, presumably, you or someone in your organization wrote the content. But take a step back for a minute. First, look at each page on your site, and decide if you even care about organic search placement for that particular page or not. For example, is there any situation where your site map is the page a user wanted to get when she put her keywords into Yahoo? Probably not — ergo, you shouldn’t worry about SEO for that page (actually, you should probably actively remove that page from the search engines, but that’s a topic for another article).

Now, for each page about which you do care, think of it in terms of what words or phrases — what keywords — a person is likely to use if what they really wanted was to find this particular page out of all the pages on the Internet. Make a list. Then, one at a time, consider carefully each set of keywords. Consider: for this particular set of keywords, if I had searched on them, is this the content I would have wanted to find. If the answer is “yes”, then, great! You’re done. But if the answer is “no”, then consider improving the content. That might mean rewriting the page, or it might mean creating a different page that would provide the best content for the keywords in question.

Second, consider your web design. This is slightly more esoteric, and slightly more technical, but only a little bit. Basically, it comes down to this: since you now have good content, the search engines want to put your content at the top of the page; but search engines are computers, so they read your page like a computer, not like a human. Fortunately for you, web pages are written in a language (HTML) the semantics of which are designed both for human readability and for machine processing. That is to say, if your web page is written in semantically correct HTML, and looks good to humans, then it probably looks good to computers, too.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about how “pretty” your page is. That portion of design: the layout, the typography, the graphics, should all be handled by CSS, not by the HTML itself. What I’m talking about is making sure that you’re using all the HTML tags, and that you’re using them properly. Are you using the various header tags? And here comes the semantically correct part: if so, are the <h1> tags actually more important than the <h2> tags? The same questions hold for the description, the title, and so on. Do your images (those that are related to content, not those that are merely decorative) have the “alt” attribute set (and, again, properly)?

A great way to test the semantical correctness of your HTML is to have a screen reader read it to you. In case you’re unfamiliar, screen readers are programs designed for the visually impaired. They do exactly what their name implies — they read your screen to you. There are a number of free versions available for Windows, and, at least since Tiger, one has been included with OS X. Because screen readers rely upon the same semantical mark-up as the search engines, having a screen reader read your pages to you will give you an indication of what they look like to the search engines. If the pages sound good when read by machine, then they probably look good when searched by machine.

The one caveat to screen readers is the inclusion of dynamic text. Text that is dynamically inserted on your page may be properly read by a screen reader, but may not be seen by a search engine. For that reason, while there are certainly good reasons to include dynamic content on your website, you should avoid inserting your “good content” via JavaScript. Similarly, you should be careful with technologies like Flash. While Flash and other multimedia technologies are an extremely valuable part of the web, they are not handled by search engines in the same way that pure HTML is. So, make sure your important content is pure, semantically correct HTML.

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