by WebKeyDesign | Jan 3, 2006 | SEO
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short), is something which many new web designers do not learn, but which is nonetheless important to the success of most web sites. SEO is really all about marketing your site. While you can market your site the old fashion way by using word-of-mouth campaigns and traditional advertising methods, the online marketing methods are all about search engines and the traffic that they can bring to your site. SEO can encompass many techniques and depending on your subject matter, the process can vary significantly. The first thing to understand is that SEO results can vary, because the search engines constantly tweak and change their algorithms and databases. It is pretty safe to say then that no one technique will work indefinitely. This is why SEO experts customize their methods so often.
It is best to think about the SEO process before you start your web site project, but this is not always possible. The following tips should help though, even if your site is already completed and active.
HTML Content
The most important SEO tip is also the most obvious, namely great content. People have to want to read your content to begin with, and so anything you can do to make your content more interesting, more accurate, more enjoyable do it!
Next you will want to extract the key words from your content. Your content is usually about something, try to narrow down (summarize) your content into one phrase, or pick out certain repeated words that best describe the paragraph or section of your content. You should then use this phrase (or keywords) as a heading for the section, or in the title tag for your html document. In HTML, there is a title tag that goes in the HEADING section, and then there are the heading tags H1, H2, H3,… . You want to make sure that you use these to accurately describe your content.
Once your content is nicely keyworded, you need to make sure that your site follows web standards as much as possible. Using valid XHTML matters because, the search engines will be able to read your site that much better. Having clean and valid code is easier to read for the search engine bot, and so if you can cut down the size of a web page by using CSS, then you should use CSS.
If your web site content is generated instead of static html pages, you will need to modify your script or program to generate the content with a search engine friendly url. In WordPress these urls are referred to as permalinks. Search engines like to have uncomplicated urls for indexing, so you have to accommodate them by using a shorter friendlier url scheme for your site.
Link Campaign
If your site is Flash based, search engines cannot read the text in Flash animations, and so you must either have plain html text to describe your flash sections, or you must have an extensive linking campaign. Search engines can figure out what a site is about by reading the content, and secondly by seeing what websites point to your site. In the case of Flash sites, the links become more important since the content is not readable.
Regardless of whether you use Flash or not though, a link campaign should be part of your overall SEO strategy. The more sites you have linking to you the more prominent your site’s ranking becomes in the search engines database. You should though avoid link farms, (sites that automatically copy your link to hundreds, perhaps thousands of other sites). Google, Yahoo, and MSNSearch have all optimized their searches to no longer include these sites or worse, can penalize your site for using them. It is best to do a natural linking campaign where you manually submit your site or email a fellow webmaster requesting a link. Many directories allow free linking or reciprocal linking (where you must also link to their site in exchange). As you naturally build up links monthly, the search engines will calculate these new links pointing to your site. In the case of Google, your Pagerank will improve within a few months. A reasonable goal is to add 10 to 12 new links a month to your site.
Monitoring Search Engine Optimization Results
SEO Shortcuts
You will want to avoid using unethical seo techniques, but there are a few SEO shortcuts that you can use. One is Google’s Sitemap, which allows webmasters to submit an XML based sitemap to Google directly. This way the search engine knows all the relevant links to your site. You will need software to create the sitemap formatted file most likely, but you can build the file manually if you have the time. The other shortcut is to actually use an advertisement campaign to drive traffic to your site. This means paying for the traffic, but if your site is ecommerce based, then you might have to do an Adwords campaign anyway. However, you should still include a link campaign and other SEO strategies to help increase traffic.
Further SEO Information
You can find information on linking strategies and other SEO topics on WebMasterWorld.com and DigitalPoint’s Forum.
To learn more about web standards check out any of the books in our WebKeyDesign Store.
For possible linking partners check out our Links Page.
by WebKeyDesign | Oct 20, 2005 | Web Site Basics
You ever watch tv and catch one of those commercials where people are sitting around a board room and the topic of discussion is some business decision and the head guy asks for the stats? Those commercials are suppose to be funny because statistics are boring, but more importantly most people do not understand what they mean! When you run your own web site, you have the same problem, but since your site is the main concern, you might not see the humor in it. All web servers keep logs and so you have all the information you could ever want about your site, but interpretting any meaning from these logs is something which you need help with. I know I certainly find web stats a lot more interesting when a program like AWStats goes ahead and shows me some nice graphs instead of just lines and lines of boring text.
Better Stats with AWStats
In cPanel, you usually have AWStats which is a basic stats package that will show you the main things you want to know, like who visited your site, what pages on your site are the most popular, and so on. There is also a basic Error Log, this is pretty useful to at least look at to see if perhaps you have a missing image file that your site keeps referring to, or if one of your scripts is asking for something repeatedly and is not finding it. If the Error Log is clean, then yes, that is a good thing. If you have some errors then you might try to look into what is wrong or simply realize that this was a one time error and not worry about it. Most times you will be using AWStats to see how your site is doing daily. However, cPanel also lets you download your raw web server logs for your site. These are incredibly more useful if you purchase a third party program. For now let’s get back to AWStats and see just what to look for:
The Summary section at the top shows you: Unique visitors, Number of visits, Pages, Hits, and Bandwidth totals. The most important stat here is the Unique Visitors. This is how many different browsers are accessing the site. This is more of a true indication of how popular your site is than Number Of Visits or Hits.
Scrolling down the AWStats report, you can see how many hits and visits you have per month, per week, per day, per hour. This is helpful in determing your peak usage, when your site is actually the most visited.
Further down you will find Hosts and Robots/Spiders sections. This will tell you who is visiting your site the most. If you are your site’s number one host, perhaps your site is not as popular as you may think. The Robots/Spiders section is useful in seeing how much bandwidth these non-human vistors are taking up.
The Pages-URL section lists the most popular pages on the site and this should prove useful if you have ads on certain pages or if you want to know if a particular section of your site is popular or not.
The Connect-To-Site-From, Search Keyphrases, and Search Keywords sections are crucial if you are working on getting search engines to link your site. These sections are really about how some users are finding their way to your site. You can use this information to understand further how your internet audience is thinking when they try to locate sites similar to yours.
The last section, HTTP Error Codes, is more informative about what is not working on your site. Knowing which pages vistors are not finding is crucial, because you want to keep visitors on your site and the best way to do that is to make sure they do not wind up going to a dead-end, like a page that no longer exists on your site.
More Stats
Once you start to get interested in your stats, you might find AWStats limiting or perhaps you just developed an obsession with looking at stats in general, so you might want to purchase third party software and download your own web server logs. There are also other options like setting up a different program similar to AWStats or paying a stat service to keep tabs on your site. The following links should prove helpful for further reading.
The Dollars And Sense of Web Analytics is a good summary of web stats in general and what a typical business site owner might want to know about stats.
We also have covered web stats in our WebKeyDesign Forum. Feel free to post questions there and view the following posts:
by WebKeyDesign | Oct 11, 2005 | Google Bits
Here is something which many small businesses probably do not know about, but should probably start using. It is Local Search. Even if your business does not have a website (which it really needs to nowadays), you can still make search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN work for you. Google even makes it easy, so even if you do not have a web site, you can still be one of the local businesses that Google recognizes.
First try out a local search on local.google.com and see for yourself. Type any city or location and then narrow it down further by adding the service you are looking for.
If you are interested in promoting your business with Google, you have to apply at the Google Local Business Center. You can read more about local search in general at http://local.google.com/help/faq_local.html.
