Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly 81

Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly 81
• The importance of keywords in all aspects of your Web site
• Meta-tags and how to optimize them for search engine placement.
Methodology to Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
To make your site search engine friendly you have to:
• Decide which search engines are critical for your success.
• Learn as much as you can about their ranking criteria and the
weighting given to each criteria in their algorithm.
Then you must:
• Determine the keywords that your target market is using in the
search engines to find what you have to offer.
• Assign those keywords to specific pages throughout your site,
and then
• Populate the pages with the assigned keywords in the appropriate
places given the ranking criteria for your targeted search
engines.
The remainder of the chapter walks you step-by-step through this
process.
Understanding Search Engines
Search engines use programs or intelligent agents,
called bots, to actually search the Internet for pages,
which they index using specific parameters as they
read the content. The agent reads the information on
every page of your site and then follows the links.
For example, Google’s spider continually crawls the
Bots
Programs used by
search engines to
search the Internet
for pages to index.
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Web looking for sites to index and, of course, indexes sites upon their
submission. Google is obviously very important in the search engine
community, so be sure your site is easily accessible to its spider. A detailed
discussion on submissions to search engines and directories can
be found in Chapter 7.
Registering with search engines is fairly simple. In most cases, you
simply have to submit your URL or Internet address on their submission
form. Even if your URL is not registered with search engines, a
number of the major search engines will eventually find you as their
bots are continually roaming the Internet looking for new sites to index.
Your odds of being indexed increase significantly if you have a
well-developed links strategy. There are millions of sites out there, so I
suggest that you be proactive and register your site to ensure a speedier
listing. Once you are registered, some of the bots will periodically visit
your site looking for changes and updates.
A common problem faced by Internet marketers is how to influence
search engines to index their site appropriately and how to ensure that
their site appears when people use relevant search criteria. Many of the
interesting and creative sites on the Internet are impossible to find because
they are not indexed with the major search engines. The majority
(85 percent) of Internet users employ search engines or directories to
find what they are looking for on the Web. They do this by typing in a
keyword or phrase that represents what they are looking for. The following
sections explore how to make your Web site more search engine
friendly.
Many search engines and directories either partner with or license
the use of another search engine or directory’s search technology. If you
submit your site to a search engine that uses Google’s index, then the
design of your site influences how you’re indexed in all search engines
that rely on Google for their search results. For example, Google’s results
can be found on AOL, Netscape, and even sites like CNN. Google’s
paid advertising results appear on many other sites as well.
In a similar fashion, you often find other search engine and directory
data intermixed or included in some form with another search
engine’s or directory’s data. For example, with Ask Jeeves its primary
search results come from Teoma while its paid listings originate from
Google. To take this example further, some search engines are built on
the premise of pooling the search results of many search providers and
presenting the results to the end user—they do not maintain their own
index, but rather manipulate the results of many other search engines
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Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly 83
in hopes of providing a better search experience. This type of search
tool is called a meta-search engine. Dogpile is an example of a metasearch
engine.
When designing your site, you must always keep the search engines
in mind. Something as simple as a DHTML drop-down menu on your
site can cause problems with the search engines and the indexing of
your site if implemented incorrectly. You want to do everything you can
to ensure that your site is designed to meet the needs of your target
audience while remaining completely search engine friendly. Search engines
can produce a significant amount of traffic to your site if you can
manage to be placed in the top search results.
Decide Which Search Engines Are Important
To start this process you want to decide which search engines you are
going to be concerned about when taking steps necessary to rank high
in their search results. You are going to limit your selection to those
search engines that are not pay to play. Ranking high in the pay-to-play
search engines is discussed in Chapter 8. You want to select a number of
the most popular search engines for your concentration. You also want
to be indexed in topic specific search engines for your industry.
You can find the most popular search engines by doing your research
on-line through sites such as Search Engine Watch (http://www.
searchenginewatch.com). You can keep up with what’s happening in the
search engines by joining one of the discussion lists on the topic. I recommend
MarketingVOX|Search (http://www.marketingwonk.com/discuss/
search/); it is highly active and full of great discussion.
There has been much consolidation in the search engine industry
lately. Yahoo! now owns Inktomi, AlltheWeb, and AltaVista. AlltheWeb
and AltaVista now return results from Yahoo!’s ‘tweaked’ Inktomi engine.
As it stands at the time of this writing, the remaining major players
in the search engine industry are:
• Google (http://www.google.com/)
• Teoma (http://www.teoma.com/)
• Yahoo! Search (http://www.yahoo.com/)
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• MSN Search (http://search.msn.com)—Their new search service
will be launched later this year to compete with the likes of
Google and Yahoo! Search.
Learn the Search Engine Ranking Criteria
Each search engine has its own unique ranking criteria and its own
unique algorithm or formula giving different weighting to each criteria
in its formula. For the search engines that you have decided to focus on
from Step 1 you have to learn as much as you can about their ranking
criteria and relative weighting.
The search engines are all fighting for market share. The more market
share a search engine has the more valuable the company is. To gain
market share a search engine has to provide better results than its competition.
It is for this reason that the search engines are changing and
improving their formulas on an ongoing basis. You have to keep up
with changes in these formulas, tweak your site accordingly and resubmit
when necessary.
The search engines use different databases for their search results.
They have different algorithms or formulas for their ranking. They have
different weighting for the various elements within their formula. They
change their formulas over time and they change their ranking over
time. Sound complicated?
It is not as daunting as it might sound because the major search
engines tend to look at similar information, but weight the relevancy
for particular items differently in their algorithms. That having been
said, here are the most important areas on a Web page that you must
address when performing organic search engine optimization:
• Title tags (page titles)
• Keywords meta-tags
• Description meta-tags
• Alt tags
• Hypertext links (e.g., anchor text)
Anchor text
The descriptive text
for a link that is visible
to the Web site user.
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Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly 85
• Domain names and file names
• Body text (beginning, middle, and end of page copy; headers)
• Between the “NOFRAMES” tag of framed Web sites.
Page titles and text-based page content are the most important of
the noted placement areas. Keyword meta-tags are not as critical as
they once were, but are still applicable for some engines.
Because Google is the favorite search engine for the time being, let’s
take a closer look at how it ranks pages. Google uses the Open Directory
database for its directory listings and its internal index for its primary
search listings. Google has many other features as well, some of
which include:
• An images search
• Usenet news data database
• A news search feature
• Froogle (a shopping search tool)
• A catalog search
• Advertising services through the Google AdWords programs.
The ranking formula for Google’s main search function looks for
the keywords in the visible body text (not in the meta-tags), headers
tags, title tags, hypertext links, Alt tags, and gives a very heavy weighting
to the link popularity with extra points for quality of links and
relevancy of text around the links.
More and more of the search engines are giving heavy weighting to
link popularity—that is the number of links to your site from other sites
on the Internet. The search engines are getting very sophisticated in the
weighting of link popularity, with some search engines giving extra points
for link relevancy—that is how high the site with the link to your site
would rank for the same keyword. Other points are awarded based on
the keywords around the link. For strategies on generating significant
links to your site see Chapter 16.
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Keywords Are Critical
A critical step in natural search engine optimization is to select the right
keywords for your business, products/services (including descriptive
words), and your target market. Understand who you are targeting and
build your search engine optimization efforts around your audience.
Keywords are the terms and phrases that your target market uses
when searching for the products and services you sell in the major search
engines and directories. Your keywords are used in everything you do
and are the key determining factor in how you rank in the search results
among many of the major search engines.
You need to choose keyword phrases that are going to bring sustainable
targeted traffic consisting of potential customers—not just anything
and everything. What you may think is the perfect keyword phrase
may not be used at all by your target market in their search queries,
which is why it is so critical to research and validate your keywords.
Ideally, each page of your Web site is going to focus on a different
set of keywords that are specific to the content at hand. If you were to
focus on the same set of keywords on every page then you would only
hit one small portion of your market potential because you are only
going to hit those same keywords over and over again—it is self-defeating.
As a general rule, you want to target somewhere between two and
five keyword phrases per page.
First, you want to gather a master list of all possible keyword phrases.
To make the data easier to manage you can create different keyword list
profiles that represent individual topics as opposed to trying to cover all
topics in a giant master list. For example, if you have two product lines
then you can create a keyword list for each product line. Naturally,
some keywords are shared across the lists, but it is important to understand
that the people looking for one topic (e.g., “jobs”) are not necessarily
the same people looking for another topic (e.g., “autos”), and as
such they are going to use different keyword combinations in their
searches.
How do you create your master keywords list? Here are four solid
techniques for generating a list of potential keyword phrases:
1. Brainstorming, surveying, and reviewing promotional material
2. Review competing and industry leading Web sites
3. Assess your Web site traffic logs
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Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly 87
4. Keyword suggestion and evaluation tools.
Be sure to record the keywords you gather in a text document in
your word-processing program or in a spreadsheet. Including them in a
spreadsheet or database of sorts makes them much easier to sort when
it comes time to prioritize the keywords and weed out the junk.
As you work your way through the list of techniques you want to
cycle back to some of the techniques because you will come across search
terms that can expand the scope of your original efforts and open the
door to new, more targeted phrases that you might have missed the first
time around.
Brainstorming, Surveying, and Reviewing Promotional Material
At this stage, the idea is to gather all the keyword phrases you can,
within reason. Sit down with a pen and paper and jot down all keywords
that come to mind. Bring other members of your team in on this
process to fuel ideas. There is nothing scientific or technical to be concerned
with here—the sky’s the limit, but try to put yourself in your
customer’s shoes.
Try to think as your target market would if they were to do a search
for information on a topic contained within your site. Do not just think
about what people would do to find your site, but what they would do
if they didn’t know your company existed and were looking for the
types of products and services you sell.
Here are several questions to help you with your brainstorming
process:
1. What industry are you in (e.g., travel)?
2. What is the focus of your Web site (e.g., a resource, a guide, a
store)? What would people search for if they were looking for a
Web site like yours?
3. If your customer were to take a guess at your Web address, what
would it be? Remember, they do not know who you are, but they
know what kind of products or services they are looking for.
4. What products and services do you sell? What are some of the
descriptive words or benefits of your products and/or services
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that might be familiar to your target market? For example, if
your site offers information on resort spas then one descriptive
keyword you might choose could be massage. Also, include words
that describe the benefits of these services or the service in more
detail such as massage therapy and full body massage.
5. Are there any regional or geographic implications to consider?
For example, there could be spelling differences to account for.
In the United States the target market might look for color laser
printer and in Canada the target market might look for colour
laser printer. Depending on the audience you are trying to communicate
with you need to tailor keyword phrases accordingly.
Also, people typically blend a destination or major landmark
with their keyword search. If you are going to Dallas you are
going to look for Dallas hotels not just hotels.
Your current corporate materials, brochures, and other marketing
collateral can be a valuable source of keyword phrases. Begin by indiscriminately
highlighting any words that people might search for if they
are looking for products or services your company has to offer.
To assist you in developing your keyword list consider asking your
customers for their input. Ask what keywords they might use to find a
site like yours. You can always turn to a thesaurus (e.g., http://
www.dictionary.com/) for additional ideas if you get stumped.
Review Competing and Industry Leading Web Sites
Check out your online competition. The term “competition” is referenced
quite loosely in that industry leaders with whom you may not
directly compete are also included here. Look at the sites for which you
have a record and look for sites in the major search engines using some
of the keyword phrases you have gathered so far.
You want to see what sites are in the top 20 positions and understand
them. By reviewing top ranking Web sites you can look for themes
and patterns in the sites that give you a good indication of what they are
going after and how they are doing it. You can then turn around and
apply this new found knowledge to your own Web site.
When reviewing competing Web sites you should look at the same
general areas you would optimize on your own Web site. As mentioned
before, the most critical keyword placement areas include:
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Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly 89
• Title tags (page titles)
• Keywords meta-tags
• Description meta-tags
• Alt tags
• Hypertext links (e.g., anchor text)
• Domain names and file names
• Body text (beginning, middle, and end of page copy; headers)
• Between the “NOFRAMES” tag of framed Web sites.
By searching for your most important keywords and observing what
the top-ranking sites are using with respect to their page content, title
tags, description meta-tags, keyword meta-tags, and so on, you can formulate
a good plan of attack. Remember that if you don’t appear in the
first two or three pages of search results, it is unlikely that prospective
visitors will access your site through the search engine.
Check to see what meta-tags your competitors have. Not only can
you learn from the sites that catch your eye, you can also learn from
your competitors’ mistakes. After you have done a thorough job of this
market research, you are in a good position to develop a description
that is catchy and adequately describes your site.
To check your competition’s meta-tags in Microsoft Internet Explorer
you simply go to their site, then click “View” on your menu bar
and select “Source” from the drop-down menu. This brings up the source
code for that respective page in whatever your default text browser is.
For most people this is Notepad. Looking for the same information in
Netscape is just as easy. On the menu bar click “View” and then select
“Page Source” from the drop-down menu.
Pay special attention to the title tag of the top ranked Web sites. To
get a little more specific you can narrow your search to keywords in a
title tag. The reason for doing this is that optimizing a title tag is a given
when it comes to search engine optimization, so it only makes sense to
look at who else is doing it as well. On Google you can enter in “allintitle:
keyword phrase,” without the quotes, to search for all pages with the
noted keywords in their title tag. This approach is a little more focused
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than simply looking for all pages with a certain set of keywords because
the keywords might just be there in passing, as a part of an article, and
not something the site is intentionally trying to target. If the keywords
are found in the title tag then there is a better chance its reason for being
there is intentional.
Not only can you learn from the sites that catch your eye, you can
also learn from your competitors’ mistakes.
Assess Your Web Site Traffic Logs
Your Web site traffic logs can be a source of pertinent keyword information.
You can view your traffic logs to see what search terms and
search engines people are using to locate your Web site and to help you
fine-tune future search engine optimization efforts.
If you are not sure whether or not you have access to a Web site
traffic analysis program check with your current Web site host to see if
they provide one to you. If not, there are plenty of tools available to you.
See Chapter 27, “Web Site Traffic Analysis,” for helpful information.
Understand that the search terms displayed may not be the most
relevant; they just happen to be the search terms people are executing to
find your site during the selected time frame. Applying new search engine
optimization techniques with relevant keywords changes how people
find your Web site. The Web site traffic analysis package you use gives
you the power to measure the impact of your optimization efforts.
Your traffic logs can be a source of inspiration for generating your
master keyword list. Note the search terms people are currently using
and add them to your list. For a more complete look at the search phrases
reported on your Web site, expand the date range to cover a larger
spread, say, over the period of a year.
When your site is optimized your Web traffic analysis tool will become
your best friend in monitoring your success.