Search Engine Optimization
Here's an article I wrote on SEO for clients at a place I used to work. Why not?
So you have a website with an awesome design and it's live, making your business look great, giving people the information they need to buy your products, participate in your events, and come back again when they want more. Perfect. Now all that's left is to get people to visit it!
This is a hurdle all websites have to overcome. Unless you're cornering a highly specific market or audience, most likely your new website is going to be competing against bigger, older, and more extensive websites. It's going to take some work to get yourself seen. So how do you become a competitor?
What Are the Basics?
Because it's just flat-out good practice, most websites done by competent web designers come included with basic Search Engine Optimization. This means that all the images are tagged with "alt" and/or "title" tags, keywords and description meta tags appear on all the pages, and it's been submitted to Google to make sure all the pages are being indexed.
Those are the basic things--the entry fee, so to speak--to get you into the never-ending race and competition for top search engine results. You can also sign up the site with Google's Webmaster Tools, and also Google Analytics, so you can use those free services to both track your traffic, and stay on top of any improvements you can implement to make it easy for Google to index your site.
What remains to be done involves some specific choices on targets, and a time commitment from YOU to establish yourself as a presence in the larger web community.
What Should I Do?
It's good to think of your website not as advertising for your business, but as an actual new business location. In order to get people to know about a new store you opened up, you would take out an ad in the newspaper, post flyers, or let enthusiast groups know about it. The exact same thing applies to your website, except you need to do the internet equivalents. Here are some quick ideas to get you started:
- Do some digging and find directories where you can list your business, such as Google's business directory on Google Maps.
- Take out ads with services such as Google Adwords and pick a very specific set of target keywords or phrases to go after.
- If you've got a lot to say about your business or the subject your website is concerned with, starting a blog or online business journal can be a good way to link back to your site, as well as establishing yourself as a voice in your field. There are many free services (such as Wordpress or Blogger) that you can set up and run yourself. If you want to help your site's rank as a whole without having to link back into it, we also can provide you with an integrated blog.
- Search the internet and find community sites or online groups and forums to join. We're not talking about posting ads for your website in a forum. If your site is about wood carving, joining a forum and answering questions intelligently will get people interested in what you do and who you are, and a discrete link in your signature could yield results.
Content is King
All of these techniques are good things to get people on your website, and get search engines to link into it. Above all, though, sites with rich content will consistently do better than sites that have the bare minimum needed. That is not to say a bloated or complicated site is better--but it's important to think about which search terms you want to show up for, and then think carefully about what kind of content you can have on your site to accomplish that. For example, if you want to target content on a website for searches like "restaurants Paducah", a section for local restaurant profiles, reviews, or even a short write-up about how a specific restaurant (maybe yours!) got started in Paducah can help boost your ranking, and give the search engines more to chew on.
Forget Meta Tags
One of the first things people associate with SEO is meta-tagging. This was an important technique back in the 90s, which led to a proliferation of experts, both legitimate and not, adept at increasing a site's position in search engines through the use of tagging (keywords, descriptions, etc) and linking.
What happened was inevitable: people started stuffing their webpages with meta tags for every conceivable related thing, and services were born also that linked websites together in huge quantities ("linkfarms"). This started playing havoc with the search engines, and where we are today in Search Engine Optimization is a result of that.
Meta tags these days are hardly used at all for search engine ranking. The description tag may very well be the most important tag now, as that tells search engines what you would prefer to have displayed as your synopsis under your website when it turns up in results. Besides that, as mentioned above, your site's position relies on quality links, and quality content.
The Only Constant is Change
Like Google itself says: there's no magic answer to get to the #1 search engine result, but there are good strategies you can use that will definitely boost your results. And the search engine listings are always changing. For example, I can check in the morning and my website can be turning up 3rd for searching "jacob web design", but then this afternoon I could be down to 5th. Tomorrow I may be first. And really, there's no way to know precisely why that is. All website owners and designers can do is connect and create content, and make sure it all points back the way we want. If you follow these steps and make a continuous effort, chances are good you will find your website moving steadily up the ranks to the holy grail of Google 1st page results.
Links to More Information
A handout Google wrote on SEO
(since Google is by and large the most popular search engine)
An explanation of PageRank, the system Google uses to rank websites
Search-based keyword tool, the descriptively-named service provided by Google to help you choose keywords based on your site's content
An explanation of meta tags, and why they don't have nearly the impact most people think.
Here's an article I wrote on SEO for clients at a place I used to work. Why not?
So you have a website with an awesome design and it's live, making your business look great, giving people the information they need to buy your products, participate in your events, and come back again when they want more. Perfect. Now all that's left is to get people to visit it!
This is a hurdle all websites have to overcome. Unless you're cornering a highly specific market or audience, most likely your new website is going to be competing against bigger, older, and more extensive websites. It's going to take some work to get yourself seen. So how do you become a competitor?
What Are the Basics?
Because it's just flat-out good practice, most websites done by competent web designers come included with basic Search Engine Optimization. This means that all the images are tagged with "alt" and/or "title" tags, keywords and description meta tags appear on all the pages, and it's been submitted to Google to make sure all the pages are being indexed.
Those are the basic things--the entry fee, so to speak--to get you into the never-ending race and competition for top search engine results. You can also sign up the site with Google's Webmaster Tools, and also Google Analytics, so you can use those free services to both track your traffic, and stay on top of any improvements you can implement to make it easy for Google to index your site.
What remains to be done involves some specific choices on targets, and a time commitment from YOU to establish yourself as a presence in the larger web community.
What Should I Do?
It's good to think of your website not as advertising for your business, but as an actual new business location. In order to get people to know about a new store you opened up, you would take out an ad in the newspaper, post flyers, or let enthusiast groups know about it. The exact same thing applies to your website, except you need to do the internet equivalents. Here are some quick ideas to get you started:
- Do some digging and find directories where you can list your business, such as Google's business directory on Google Maps.
- Take out ads with services such as Google Adwords and pick a very specific set of target keywords or phrases to go after.
- If you've got a lot to say about your business or the subject your website is concerned with, starting a blog or online business journal can be a good way to link back to your site, as well as establishing yourself as a voice in your field. There are many free services (such as Wordpress or Blogger) that you can set up and run yourself. If you want to help your site's rank as a whole without having to link back into it, we also can provide you with an integrated blog.
- Search the internet and find community sites or online groups and forums to join. We're not talking about posting ads for your website in a forum. If your site is about wood carving, joining a forum and answering questions intelligently will get people interested in what you do and who you are, and a discrete link in your signature could yield results.
Content is King
All of these techniques are good things to get people on your website, and get search engines to link into it. Above all, though, sites with rich content will consistently do better than sites that have the bare minimum needed. That is not to say a bloated or complicated site is better--but it's important to think about which search terms you want to show up for, and then think carefully about what kind of content you can have on your site to accomplish that. For example, if you want to target content on a website for searches like "restaurants Paducah", a section for local restaurant profiles, reviews, or even a short write-up about how a specific restaurant (maybe yours!) got started in Paducah can help boost your ranking, and give the search engines more to chew on.
Forget Meta Tags
One of the first things people associate with SEO is meta-tagging. This was an important technique back in the 90s, which led to a proliferation of experts, both legitimate and not, adept at increasing a site's position in search engines through the use of tagging (keywords, descriptions, etc) and linking.
What happened was inevitable: people started stuffing their webpages with meta tags for every conceivable related thing, and services were born also that linked websites together in huge quantities ("linkfarms"). This started playing havoc with the search engines, and where we are today in Search Engine Optimization is a result of that.
Meta tags these days are hardly used at all for search engine ranking. The description tag may very well be the most important tag now, as that tells search engines what you would prefer to have displayed as your synopsis under your website when it turns up in results. Besides that, as mentioned above, your site's position relies on quality links, and quality content.
The Only Constant is Change
Like Google itself says: there's no magic answer to get to the #1 search engine result, but there are good strategies you can use that will definitely boost your results. And the search engine listings are always changing. For example, I can check in the morning and my website can be turning up 3rd for searching "jacob web design", but then this afternoon I could be down to 5th. Tomorrow I may be first. And really, there's no way to know precisely why that is. All website owners and designers can do is connect and create content, and make sure it all points back the way we want. If you follow these steps and make a continuous effort, chances are good you will find your website moving steadily up the ranks to the holy grail of Google 1st page results.
Links to More Information
A handout Google wrote on SEO
(since Google is by and large the most popular search engine)
An explanation of PageRank, the system Google uses to rank websites
Search-based keyword tool, the descriptively-named service provided by Google to help you choose keywords based on your site's content
An explanation of meta tags, and why they don't have nearly the impact most people think.