Search Engine Optimization

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

This guide to search engine optimization will give you the information you need in order to help you achieve high search engine rankings for your web site. There are thousands of web sites all competing for the same search terms or keywords. Unfortunately, if your site does not have high search engine rankings or even worse, not ranked at all, no one will ever find you. If you are looking for quick little search engine optimization secrets that will propel your web site to the top of the search engine rankings, you will not find them here!  What we will show you is a systematic approach to search engine optimization that will greatly improve your chances of success. 

No Magic Formula to Getting High Search Engine Rankings: Focus on Content

As we stated in the introduction, there are no secrets for achieving high search engine rankings. You can, however, greatly improve your chances of success by taking a systematic approach to search engine optimization.  That being said, the most important determining factor toward achieving high search engine rankings is your content. When we say content, we are referring to text and links, not images. Search engines are large databases that gather text and links from web pages and classify them according to certain criteria. The people who design and run search engines are interested in providing links to the most relevant information for their users. Ideally, they would like to give high search engine rankings to those who have quality content that is relevant to the search terms or keywords entered by their users. So our number one piece of advice is give the search engines what they want: good relevant content!

This may seem obvious, but often overlooked in many search engine optimization guides. Concentrate on developing good and compelling content and lots of it! 

Lets look at an example. Lets say that you run an on-line art gallery. You hire a web site design company to create a web site that allows people to browse pictures of the art and purchase them using an on-line shopping cart.  Your web site design firm has created a visually attractive site. They have made an earnest attempt at achieving high search engine rankings by strategically placing meta-tag keywords (We will explain meta-tags and keywords in great detail later in this article). Unfortunately, their attempts at search engine optimization failed; your web site did not even rank in the top one hundred listing of the various search engines!

So what went wrong? The web site was mostly made up of images with a title and description of the paintings. Remember, the search engines can only index text content and links so to the search engine, you beautiful art gallery was just a bunch of short snippets of text like “Title of work: Summer Rain” and “Description: Summer rain is a painting the evokes the many pleasant emotions and experiences associated with a cool summer’s rain”. Obviously, scanty amounts of text like that will not get you high search engine rankings on search terms such as “ On-line art gallery”. But what about the meta-tag keywords, you might ask, didn’t they help? The answer is no. Keywords only help with search engine optimization if they are also contained within the text of the page.

So in this example, what would be the best way of achieving high search engine rankings? The first step would be to develop pages with text content that would be of interest to the visitor of the on-line gallery. You could, for example, add pages describing each artist and profiling their work in detail. You could also add articles about how to evaluate art, care for your art and so on.  The main thing this content will do, of course, is add value and character to your site. It also provides lots of relevant text for the search engines to optimize.  Once you have developed your content, you can now concentrate on fine-tuning it in order to achieve high search engine rankings.

Search Engine Optimization: A Systematic Approach

As we pointed out in the previous section, the search engines are looking for content that is most relevant to their users.  This means that their databases and software use certain criteria for evaluating what is relevant content and what is not. Each search engine uses different criteria for determine who will get high search engine rankings and who will not. And then there are web directories, such as Yahoo, who use people to evaluate and rank web sites. So our best strategy toward search engine optimization is to take a systematic approach. Here is a summary of the topics we will explore:

Understanding the Difference Between Search Engines and Directories: We will show you the difference the difference between search engines and directories.

Decide on Which Search Engines to Target: Learn about which search engine and directories are most popular, how they are inter-related, and what general criteria each one uses in their search engine ranking.

Identify Keywords: We will get into the mechanics of search engine optimization. We will look at how to identify the keywords that you should target and out of these, which ones are the most likely to produce results.

Tweaking Your Content: Once you write your content and identify your keywords, now is the time to tweak your content so you can improve your chances of gaining high rankings.

How to Use Meta-Tags to Improve Search Engine Rankings: You will learn what meta-tags are and how you can use them to help the search engines index your content. You will also learn how misuse of meta-tags can actually get you banned from search engines.

Analyze Your Competition: Learn how to look at who is ranking highly in search engines results for your selected keywords and analyze what they are doing.  Also learn to identify if they are using advanced methods such as cloaked pages for search engine optimization.

Submit Your Web Site to Search Engines and Directories: Once you are satisfied that you have optimized your web site, its now time to submit your site to the search engines and directories. Find out what to do and what not to do.
Track Your Progress and Refine Your Pages: Assess how your site is doing and refine your content in order to improve your results.
When Search Engine Optimization and Web Site Design Conflict: What do you do with a site that is mostly graphics? This section will explain what to do when the look and feel of your web site design conflict with achieving high search engine rankings.

How Links Can Improve Your Search Engine Rankings: Many search engines consider who is linking to your web site as an important factor in how they rank your web site.

Special Care Required to Achieve High Search Engine Rankings- Frames, Dynamic Pages, and Database Driven Web Site Designs: Search engines may not index Sites that use Frames if special care is not taken. Pages with dynamic content generated by sever side-programming languages such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Java Server Pages (JSP), and PHP can present special problems. This is especially true if the pages are generated from a database. Find out how you can create search engine optimized dynamically generated content.

Search Engine Optimization Methods that Don’t Work: There are tricks commonly use by many web site designers that are a waste of time and money or even worse, may get you band from a search engine’s database. Find out what these are so you can avoid them.

Celestial Graphics Can Provide Search Engine Optimization For Your Site as Part of Our Web Design Services: Find out how Celestial Graphics can provide search engine optimization as a part of a web site design package.

Understanding the Difference Between Search Engines and Directories

A search engine is a machine-indexed database of web page content. A directory is organized by subject and assembled by people. Examples of search engines are Google, AltaVista, Excite and iWon. Examples of indexes include Yahoo, About.com and Open Directory.

Search engines send out programs called “robots” or “spiders” that gather text information on your web site and send the information back to the search engine. Another program will then classify or “index” the content and place it within the search engine’s database. Each search engine uses different criteria for how they index web pages. The spiders come to your web site either by you request or through links from other sites. Once your site is indexed, the spider will returns to your site at a scheduled interval to check for new or changed content.  Except for you making a request to have your site indexed, the entire process is done automatically without human intervention.

Directories on the other hand, are more analogous to your telephone yellow pages.  Directories index web sites by topic. Unlike search engines, directories will not index your site unless you specifically asked them to. Directories will insist that you choose a specific topic area for your site. A real person will visit your web site and determine how it will be listed. Search engine optimization techniques will not help you get better ranking in a directory. Compelling content will.

Decide on Which Search Engines to Target

Each search engine and directory has differing criteria when it comes to determining who will receive high search engine rankings. It is important to understand what each search engine is looking for as you fine-tune your content. Although you have probably heard much hype about getting your web site listed in hundreds of search engines or directories, in reality there are only a handful that are significant. With the exception of getting listings in small indexes in your specialized subject area, it is probably best to concentrate on search engines and directories with the largest audiences.

 Lets look at which are the most popular search engines and directories. According to Search Engine Watch, the top search engines and directories by popularity of visitors to their web site are:

Yahoo, MSN, Infoseek, Lycos, Netscape, Excite, Looksmart, AltaVista, GoTo, Google, iWon, Ask Jeeves, Hot Bot, Direct Hit, Web Crawler, Open Directory and Northern Light.

 But this does not tell the whole story. “Under the hood” many of these search engines and directories are actually powered by other search engines and directories. For example, if an entry is not found in Yahoo’s directory, it uses Google’s index. This would give high ranking in Google much more importance than its eleventh position would indicate.

The main search engines that work behind the scenes are Inktomi and Google. The main directory that works behind the scenes is called Open Directory. Getting high search engine rankings in all three of these can therefore be very important.

Identify Keywords

Identify Keywords that are Most Likely Used By Potential Customers

Determining what keywords you will target is probably the most important thing you will do in the search engine optimization process outside of developing your content. Keywords are the words or phrases that people enter in the search engine query box.  First thing you need to determine is what keywords or phrases people are most likely to use when searching for the goods, services, or information your web site offers.

 Put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers. What words or phrases would they enter into a search engine in order to find a web site with the goods and services you have to offer? A good place to start would be to write down a one paragraph statement that describes the goods, services or information that your organization offers. Write another one paragraph statement that describes what people are looking for when they normally approach your organization. This exercise will help you discern the difference between keywords that summarize your content and keywords that people are most likely to use to find your content. Our goal is to optimize your content for high search engine rankings for what people are likely to search on.

Use the second one paragraph statement you wrote to help you brainstorm a list from ten to a hundred words or phrases that people are likely to search on. It may also be helpful to conduct a survey of 10 to 50 potential users. You can use the first one paragraph statement you wrote to help you formulate the survey questions. Here is an example. Suppose you want to create a web site that matches people who want are looking to adopt a pet with people and organizations that are trying to find homes for unwanted pets. So your one paragraph statement could read:

“ We are a non-profit on-line free pet adoption service. We provide a free nationwide service of bringing together people who want to adopt pets with people and organizations that have homeless and unwanted pets.”

From this statement you can extract survey questions like: “How would you find a free on-line pet adoption service using a search engine or web directory?”

After you have identified the list of potential keywords, go to one or two of the search engines that you plan on targeting and do a search with each of these words. This is a quick way of identifying those keywords and phrases that will yield search engine results with web sites similar to your own. Eliminate those keywords that yield web sites not even close to your own.

Target Keywords that Maximize Your Likely Hood of Success

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could identify the keywords most likely to be searched on but have the least number of competing web sites? Fortunately, there are tools that will help you do this. The best one we found is called Word Tracker. Enter a keyword or phase, and Word Tracker will show you how many people searched on that word or phrase that day for each of the major search engines. Word Tracker will also show you how many listings they had for that keyword or phase.  Word Tracker is available by weekly, monthly or annual subscription. An on-line demo is also available that has limited features but is still very useful. 

Hone in on a Small Final List of Keywords

After using the techniques described above, you should now have honed in on a small list of keywords. Depending on the size of your site, this should range anywhere from two to twenty words. These will be the words you will use to for search engine optimization of your web site.

Tweaking Your Content

Once you have written your content and chosen your keywords, you should tweak your content in order to optimize your page for the search engines. Here are some things to keep in mind.

1.       Many search engines rank the first 150 to 200 words of your site as the most important. This means that you should make an effort to make sure that this area of you web page in fairly dense in your chosen keywords. Be careful not to over do it. Some of the search engines will penalize you for over use of the same keywords. It seems to be a general consensus among experts in this field that you should not have a keyword density between 2% and 7% overall in your page.

2.       Make generous use of HTML heading tags. Heading tags add a recognizable structure to your web site that make it easier for the search engines to index. Many web site designers avoid heading tags because they can look ugly. One way to avoid this is to use an external cascading style sheet that redefines how the heading tags will look. Headings are hierarchical. For example, an <h1></h1> heading tag generally denotes the overall heading of the page. An <h2></h2> heading tag denotes the highest-level section heading. An <h3></h3> heading tag denotes the first sub-topic under the <h2> heading and so on. Here is an example of a typical structure as viewed in HTML format:

If you are not familiar with HTML markup, the <p> ... </p> tag set means paragraph. The content contained with the <h1> </h1> tags should generally be the title of your page. Make sure that this title contains your most important keywords.

3.       Use an analysis tool that helps you optimize your content. There are several good search engine optimization tools on the market that will give you specific advice on how to improve your pages for each search engine. Celestial Graphics Web Site Design Services uses several of these tools. Here is a list of tools you can consider.

Web Position Gold by First Place Software: Web Position Gold comes in several versions including the one that we use, Web Position Gold Pro. You purchase Web Position Gold as boxed software and then pay for annual or quarterly updates. One warning: in order for Web Position Gold to stay useful, you will need to subscribe to the updates. They do not make this clear on their web site.
Bruce Clay’s SEO Tool Set: Bruce Clay provides an suite of tools that is available on-line through an annual subscription fee.
Keyword Counter: A free on-line tool that counts the density of all keywords in any web page you choose according to criteria that you specify.
Keyword Density Analyzer: A free on-line tool that allows you to compare the keyword density of two web pages.

How to Use Meta-Tags to Improve Search Engine Rankings

Meta-tags are probably the most over hyped and misunderstood item when it comes to search engine optimization. There is nothing “secret” or mysterious about meta-tags. So lets look at what they are and how they can help you improve your search engine ranking if used properly or hinder your efforts if used improperly. Meta-Tags are special HTML tags that appear in the head portion of a web page. The head portion of the web page is not displayed in your browser. The head portion contains information that is read by the search engines such as the title of the page, the description of the page, and what keywords are contained in the page. Here is an example of the a very simple HTML page that displays the following text:

Here is what the HTML looks like that would have generated that web page.

Notice that nothing in the head section is displayed in the page, only the phrase “Sample Web Page Showing the Use of Meta-Tags” is shown. Lets look at each element in the head area one by one.

Title: The title is the most important element of the head section. Most search engines give very high weight to the title of the page. So the title of your page is very important in your search engine optimization effort. This is the title that the search engines will use when they list your web site. Try to keep your title to under 6 words or less than 100 characters.

Description: The description is also important. Most search engines will use this as the description in their search engine results for your web site. Make sure to include your targeted keywords within the text of your description. Do not make your description a list of keywords. It should consist of complete sentences.  Keep the description to fewer than 150 words.

Keywords: This is where you tell the search engines what keywords to look for in the page. DO NOT use keywords that are not contained in the page’s text content. Do not repeat words. For example: cat, cats, large hairy red cats.  Notice how the keywords in the example are separated by commas but without any spaces.

Important Note: It is extremely important that the title and description reflect the content of the page. It is also essential that the keywords are actually contained within the page. If not, the search engine may consider that you are trying create false content in order to manipulate them into giving you higher search engine ranking and will ignore your keywords or in the worst case, not list your site.

Also note that not all search engines consider meta-tag keywords and descriptions when they index a site. Google and Excite do not consider meta-tag keywords in their search engine rankings. Google also does not index meta-tag descriptions.

Analyze Your Competition

Now that you have prepared your content, it now time to see how it stacks up against the web sites with top search engine rankings for your targeted keywords. Ideally, you should analyze the top ten ranked sites for each of your targeted keywords in each of your targeted search engines. This means going through every site and looking at the placement and density of the keywords, use of meta-tags, page title, page description, links and so on. We know from painful experience that to do this by hand can be very time consuming. Fortunately, the tools we mentioned in the section on Tweaking Your Content can help make this task much less painful. These tools are Web Position Gold by First Place Software, Bruce Clay’s SEO Tool Set, Keyword Counter, and Keyword Density Analyzer. The first two are commercial programs while the second two are freeware.

Once you compared your web site against your competition, you can now realistically improve your chances of success. If your site does not compare well against the competition, assess the differences and go back and teak your content and try the analysis again.

Beware of Stealth Pages

If you are offering goods or services that are highly competitive on the web, you are very likely to run into web sites that use stealth pages. The concept behind stealth pages is very simple. Give each of the search engines optimized content while giving the ordinary visitor to your web site normal content. So the content you see is not the content the search engines see.

How is this done? Every time you type in a web address you being sent to computer or web server that holds that web page’s content. The web server has the ability to identify the IP address of the machine requested the web page. People who create stealth pages keep a list of IP addresses of the search engine spiders or indexing program. So when a request for a web page comes from the search engine’s spider, the web server will redirect them to a phony web site with content especially prepared for them.

It is important to learn how to identify stealth pages so you can eliminate them from the analysis of your competition. Fortunately, this is not that difficult. If a site is not very content rich, or stands out because it does not fit the pattern of the rest of the web pages in your analysis, chances are it is a stealth page or stealth site.  Most search engines consider stealth pages an unethical manipulation of their database and are actively trying to develop ways of combating this practice. Google’s solution is to “cache” or store a copy the web page it actually indexed. Google lets you view this cached page. This is a foolproof way of viewing the web page exactly as Google did when they indexed it.

Submit Your Site to the Search Engines and Directories

The next step in the process of search engine optimization is to submit your site to the search engines. There are many services that will automatically submit your pages to the search engines. Although some of them are probably good, we feel it is still risky and do not recommend this. Search engines are very sensitive to individuals who “Spam” their index by submitting automatic bulk submissions. Many search engines will either ignore the entries or if you really over do it, will ban your web site from being indexed. We strongly recommend you submit your pages by hand. It is important that you read the instructions for submitting your web site provided by each of the search engines. You may need to submit your requests more than once because the search engines are known for dropping or loosing requests.

Directories, like Yahoo, require you to fill out a questionnaire about your web site. This information will help determine how your site is categorized. In addition, most directories will only let you submit URLs in specific categories. It is worth spending the time and doing some research to determine what category would be most likely to be searched by someone looking for the goods, services or information that your web site offers.

Some of the search engines offer a guarantee that they will index your site within a specified length of time for a fee. This fee, usually between $100 and $200, does not guarantee that you will receive high search engine rankings, only that your site will be indexed!

Track Your Progress and Refine Your Pages

Once you have submitted your web site it is time to track your progress. Some search engines like AltaVista, will spider your site within one to two days. Others may take up to eight weeks unless you pay them to index your site quickly. There are several good tools for tracking your progress. This include the previously mentioned Web Position Gold by First Place Software, Bruce Clay’s SEO Tool Set, as well as Net Mechanic.

Based on your results, continue to improve your site. The best way to do this is add fresh content that will be of interest to the visitors of your site. Overtime many web sites will develop broken links. If you have a large site or a site with a lot of links, continually monitor your site to make sure that your site does not have any broken links. Your search engine ranking will drop if your site develops broken links.

When Search Engine Optimization and Web Site Design Conflict

Lets say you built a beautiful graphically rich web site with many photos and text rendered as images. You place meta-tag keywords in the head section as well as a good title and description. You submit your site to all of the major search engines and you find many weeks later that your search engine rankings are either very low or non-existent. If you followed this article so far, you can probably guess what happened. The page had very little text for the search engines to index. The meta-tags were ignored because they did not match any of the text in the page.

So how can we accomplish search engine optimization and still keep the web sites beautiful appearance? You need to balance content vs. appearance. With some thought, you will be able to get the graphical appearance you are looking for while at the same time, provide meaningful content for the visitors to your site. Chances are, finding a better balance between graphical appearance and meaningful text content will also make your site more meaningful to your viewers. Remember the example of the on-line art gallery at the beginning of this article? Adding quality content about the artist, the paintings, care of paintings, etc. only adds to the value of your web site.

There are a few other things you can do that can help. Make sure that every image has an HTML <alt> tag. An alt tag is text that appears when the image is loading or in place of the image if the image is not displayed. Most search engines will index alt tags. Alt tags will also help make your site friendlier to the handicap. Use relevant text to describe your images.

How Links Can Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Some search engines, such as Google, will give higher ranking to web sites that have many other sites linking to them. According to Google, the quality and relevancy of the link counts. A popular site with a relevant link to your web site will boost your ratings. Google actually has an advanced search feature that allows you to find out who in their index is linked to your web site. In Google’s search box type link: and the URL of the web site. For example, link:www.yourwebsite.com. There are also some tools that will help you determine your link popularity. These include:

Special Care Required to Achieve High Search Engine Rankings- Frames, Dynamic Pages, and Database Driven Web Site Designs

Certain types of web site designs and web application frameworks require special care in order to be search engine friendly. Lets look at how you can achieve high search engine rankings for each of these types of web sites.

Frames

Web sites that use frames can be difficult for search engines to index. A frame site actually consists of a main web page called a frameset and sub-pages or child frames. The frameset defines the structure of the frames such as size location and name. The content is actually stored in the child frames. If you were to view the HTML source of a frame site you would only see the HTML for the frameset.  Unfortunately, this is also what the search engine “spider” or indexing program would also see. Since the frameset does not contain any content beyond the page title, and meta-tags the web site will probably not be indexed in less that search engine accidentally stumbles upon one of your child pages.

Fortunately there is a very easy solution. There is a tag called <noframes> </noframes> that is placed inside your frameset page that provides alternative content for sites that cannot read frames. You can fill the <noframes> tags with content from your home page and with links to all of the child frames of your web site. Now when the search engine spider comes to your web site, it sees the frameset and the <noframes> content. There is one caution to this approach. Since the search engines are going to index your child frames outside the context of your frameset, when viewers come to your set they will only see the child frame and not the entire frameset. You should ensure that the visitor to your site would be led back into your frameset by placing a link at the bottom of each child frame to the frameset. You can give this link the name HOME.

Dynamic Pages and Database Driven Web Sites

Almost every e-commerce site uses some type of server-side programming language to provide dynamic content. Many of these sites get their content from databases. These types of sites present special problems for search engines. Consider the following URL: www.somewebsite.com/somepage.jsp?session_id=X34yA8We&page_id=23.  Many search engines will ignore and URLs that contain ? and &. This means that your dynamically served site with 5000 pages of content on the wildlife in the rainforests around the world would not be indexed. 

This problem is often sited as a weakness of Microsoft’s active server pages (ASP) but is actually a problem common to all scripting languages such as Perl, PHP Cold Fusion (CFM), or Java Server Pages (JSP). The basic problem is passing variables in the URL. So how can you achieve high search engine rankings on a site with this format?

Fortunately, there are ways around this so that your database or web application driven web site can be search engine optimized. Your web site design firm can develop an application framework that presents the URL in a search engine friendly form. For example the URL: www.somewebsite.com/somepage.jsp?session_id=X34yA8We&page_id=23 could become www.somewebsite.com/somepage/ X34yA8We/23. Celestial Graphics web design services has built this web site with our own custom portable application framework. All of the pages on this site generated dynamically. Yet our URLs are in a search engine friendly form. Click here for more information about our application framework we used on this web site.

Search Engine Optimization Methods that Don’t Work

There are many search engine optimization techniques that don’t work. In the best case, your page will be ignored. In many cases, the search engines may not index your site at all. Here are a few of them.

Invisible Text: With this technique, text is placed on the page that has the same color as the page’s background so you can’t see it. The search engines will still read the text even though it is invisible to the human eye. People who use this technique fill their pages with invisible text that contain their keywords. Besides being sneaky and not very ethical, this technique is a sure way to get your site banned from many of the search engines. The search engine indexing programs look for text that has the same color as the page’s background. 

Automatic Page Redirects: Some people have the idea that they can create a page filled with text and keywords that only displays for an instant, then by Java Script, or by using the page refresh meta-tag or some other mechanism, you are automatically redirect you to their home page. Search engines are on to this technique and will not index your site if you use it.

Duplicate Pages with Different URLs: Some people have the mistaken belief that putting the same content on multiple URLs will yield higher search engine rankings. Many search engines will recognize content they have already indexed and ignore it.

Excessive Requests to Get Your Pages Indexed: Search engines do not appreciate being spammed. Do not submit too many page requests to search engines in a day. Be careful using automatic submission software. Many search engines will not index your site if they detect that the submission was made by automatic submission software.

Celestial Graphics Can Provide Search Engine Optimization for Your Site as Part of Our Web Design Services

By now you are probably thinking that search engine optimization is a lot of work. Well, your right. It can take many hours or even days of work to choose your keywords, analyze your competition, optimize your content and submit the pages to the search engines. Why not let us handle this for you? Celestial Graphics as a part of our web site design service will analyze and optimize your entire web site to help you achieve high search engine rankings.