Search Engine ‘Optimization’ vs. Search Engine ‘Friendly’ – What You Need to Know
I keep coming across web designers who say they provide ‘Search Engine Optimization’ by using heading tags, text links, and non-dynamic links, and decided it was time to make some clarifications.
Search Engine ‘Friendly’ involves building the foundation and features of the site in a way that the search engine spiders can comprehend. Having a ‘search engine friendly’ site does not necessarily help you climb the organic rankings, but there’s no reason to intentionally build your website without integrating these concepts.
Search Engine ‘Optimization’ as a service is more related to keywords and organic rankings, and involves both on-site and off-site work to achieve these goals.
Ways to make your website ‘Search Engine Friendly’ (easily read by a Search Engine):
- Use HTML and text to display your content, not images, Flash animations, or Video. Images, Flash, and Video can be used to enhance the appearance and value of your site, but they mean nothing to the search engines. If it’s important for your content to be indexed, also include it as text on the page.
- Use a CSS-styled menu bar with text links, not images. If you want a snazzy menu bar, consider using AJAX as an animation and styling alternative to images and flash. It’s important for the search engine spiders to read the text of the link it follows.
- Use relevant ‘Alt tags’ on all your images. This gives the search engines something to index each image for, since it can’t read or interpret an image.
- Use non-dynamic URLs, avoid passing arguments via the URL. If this is over your head, don’t worry about it. It just means that search engines have trouble handling URLs with “?”s in them. This is fine for shopping carts, and private access areas of your website that spiders shouldn’t be crawling anyway, but if you want the search engine spider to find it, make it accessible without using a “?”
- Create an HTML site map. This is a page on your site that has a link to every other page (and should be ‘linked-to’ from every other page). It will help your visitors locate a page in a pinch, and works well to make sure all your pages can be accessed from one place.
- Submit an XML site map to Google. Most developers will miss this one even if they get the rest correct. Every web designer should have an account at Google Webmaster Central. This account can be used to check crawl statistics, broken links, meta tags, and most importantly, to submit a site map of all your pages to Google. This works MUCH better than submitting your URL the old fashioned way. There’s much more credibility associated with an XML site map submission than a plain old URL submission. To create your XML site map, follow the XML Sitemap formatting guide.
Search Engine ‘Optimization’ Strategies (ranking higher in organic search results for a certain set of keywords):
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Use keywords in image ‘alt’ tags. By using specific, keyword-rich, ‘alt’ tags, like ‘Portland Web Designer Vanivo’ instead of ‘logo’ or ‘header,’ the search engine can get a much better idea of what the image is about, while helping your keyword-to-content ratio.
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Put your most popular keywords in your meta tags. Google doesn’t use meta tags anymore, but Yahoo! and MSN Live Search still do, so it doesn’t hurt to address this. Make sure each page has a unique description and set of keywords revolving around the page content. Duplicate meta tags are frowned upon.
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Use a unique, keyword rich title on every page. While you’re putting your meta tags in the header, don’t forget to write a keyword-rich title that is unique to the page. This helps search engines decide which page to show and works in tandem with your keyword-focused content.
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Focus on one keyword for each page. You want to mention your keyword at least a few times in a page that focuses on that topic. Most experts recommend a keyword-to-content ratio of 3-7%, which means 3-7% of the words on your page are your targeted keyword phrase. Personally, I aim for the lower end of that spectrum, since 7% just doesn’t read naturally in most cases.
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Start a blog on your topic. Search engines LOVE blogs – they tend to be frequently updated with topical content. When a search engine finds a blog on your site, it will likely return much sooner to see if you’ve posted anything new. When you write a blog article, try to focus on one topic so the search engine spider can classify it better. Also, use topical keywords in your article..
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Create a network of back links. This is far and away the most important aspect of getting your site to rank high for a specific keyword. The keyword should be in the anchor text to get the most credit. For example, a great link for us would be: Portland Web Design - since the keyword we’d like to rank high for is used as the anchor text, and the link goes straight to our web page optimized for that keyword. To see how effective this actually is, search Google for “click here” – you’ll see the first page is for Adobe Reader download, since hundreds of thousands of pages have ‘To download Adobe Reader, click here‘ with ‘click here’ as the anchor text. Powerful stuff!
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Use social networking to increase your traffic and exposure. A few more web page views never hurt, and by getting more traffic, you’re demonstrating your importance to traffic measuring services like Alexa, which provide credibility for your site.
That’s all the tips for today, stay tuned for more Internet marketing strategy articles! As always, if you like it, please Digg it!
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Tony Kau is co-founder of Portland web design and Internet marketing company Vanivo. For service inquiries, you can contact him directly at tony -at- vanivo.com.
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