SEO Best Practices

What Are Search Engines Looking For Anyway?

Two things seem to be of maximum importance in obtaining prominent rankings with search engines:

  • A decent amount of meaningful content that contains keywords for which your target audience might search
  • Links to your site from external sources of high quality

Choosing Good Keywords

When you think about it, if you have the first, you’ll more than likely aquire the second. Perhaps a good place to start — even before writing your content — is to do some research to find good keywords for your site. One tool for doing this is Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool. With this tool, you can enter a keyword and see how many people have searched for it during the last month and also, related searches that might be of interest. To test it, I entered “findability” to give me ideas of what keywords to put on the opening page of this site. Turned out there were only 3 listings: “ambient findability” with 6454 searches, “findability” with 132 searches, and “findability poker site web” with 78 searches. People searching for ambient findability are more than likely looking for Peter Morville’s book or blog, which means that wouldn’t be a good keyword for me to use. Obviously, the poker reference won’t help me, either. Findability alone doesn’t really get that many hits, so I decided to look further.

I entered “SEO” as a keyword and got much better results. There were over 100 searches listed for terms related to SEO. The trick at this point is to choose keywords in “The Long Tail”, which means skipping over those that are wildly popular in favor of less popular ones. The idea behind The Long Tail theory is that although there’s little point in trying to compete with the big names in your field, if you can define and locate a “niche” audience, people trying to find exactly what you’re offering will be more likely to locate you. So, for example, with my SEO search, I might not want to try to capitalize on “SEO” or “SEO Services”, which got 46,000+ and 11,000+ hits during the past month. Instead, I might want to use “expert SEO” (3000+ searches) or even “SEO service” (singular) which had 1000+ hits.

If you want more detailed information on specific keywords, I’ve found WordTracker to be a good tool. It offers a free trial that lasts for 2 hours, and if you’re sold on it like I was, the pricing is reasonable. You can get a day’s subscription for under $10 and that will allow you to research to your heart’s content to find the very best keywords for your site.

Ok, I’ve Got Good Keywords. Now What Do I Do With Them?

This is where it gets fun because there are lots of places you can use your keywords. The very best place of all is probably within your content. Don’t write just to be writing and don’t use a keyword in every other sentence, but write good quality content that people will want to read. When you’re ready to name your file, name it with relevant keywords so the page’s URL will stand out to search engine bots. For example, if you check your address bar, you’ll notice that the name of this file is seo-best-practices/ because I’m hoping to capitalize on people who are interested in reading about that. The <title> tag is also a good place to use keywords. The title I chose for this page is “Findability Blog >> SEO Best Practices. I can also put keywords in my meta tags. Some search engines don’t rely much (if at all) on meta tags anymore since they’re so easily abused by Black Hat SEOers. However, some search engines do still use them and it definitely won’t hurt to put them in. When putting keywords in meta tags, however, use different meta tags for each page instead of just copy/pasting one big meta blob to each page of your site.

Other Good Search Engine Optimization Practices

There are many other SEO dos and don’ts which I’ll list below:

DO:

  • Use sound well-structured (X)HTML. For example, I almost coded the “DO:” above with a paragraph tag and then a strong tag. Silly me. That “DO” is a header. A weak one — worked out to be an h4 — but still, it’s a header. I could make it look like an h4 by using CSS, but it wouldn’t look as important to a search engine as a header tag would. Why do I care if a search engine finds my “DO:” header? Well, I may not, to be honest. But on the other hand, if someone searches for “SEO DOS DON’TS”, they just might find this page.
  • Make sure each page in your site is reachable by at least one text link.
  • Create links from your home page, sitemap and navigation to all major pages in your site.
  • Validate your sites.
  • Make your sites accessible.
  • Create text equivalents for non-text items (e.g., “alt”, “longdesc”).

DON’T:

  • Overuse images for text, e.g., in navigation buttons. If you really need to use images for navigation, be sure to include alt attributes for your img tags and title attributes for your anchor tags.
  • Overuse JavaScript. When you do use JavaScript, strive for Unobtrusive Javascript.
  • Create duplicate copies of pages in your site. If you have a print version or text-only version of a page, use a robots.txt file to block the duplicate copy so it doesn’t look like you’re trying to fool Mother Nature . . . er, Google.
  • Overuse dynamically generated pages. If your site is dynamically-driven, you might want to consider making duplicate static copies of each dynamic page and then using a robots.txt file on the dynamic one do you don’t risk having a duplicate.
  • Use things such as image maps, frames and drop-down menus unless you have a really good reason.
  • Use Black Hat SEO techniques such as cloaking, keyword stuffing or using invisible text.

How Do I Get Those All-Important Links to My Site?

This one is harder. Obviously writing really good content that people like and want to share helps. Still, though, people have to be able to find your content before they can read it and really high Google rankings depend on having people linking to your site. It reminds me of looking for your first job and being rebuffed because you don’t have experience.

Obviously, networking within your field helps. Contact expert or organizational sites in your industry to see if they accept link submissions. Similarly, contact friends and colleagues to see if they’d be willing to add your link to their site.

You can also submit your site directly to Google and other search engines. Build a sitemap page and submit that to the search engines as well.

Finally, there are some directories you can submit your site to. The Open Directory Project is an excellent one because it’s free and because it feeds content directly to Google. The Yahoo! Directory is also good, although their service is not free.