Ok, what are the golden rules of SEO? SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving a website so that it appears higher up in the search engine results pages for targeted keywords. Over the years there have been a variety of different methods developed to improve “rankings” in the search engines, and these methods have been developed and updated to take into account changes to the way search engines work. In the early days of search engine optimisation, cunning webmasters used methods such as keyword stuffing (repeating the keywords throughout the content of the site, and in META tags such as keywords, description, and in image alts), invisible text (i.e. same colour as the page background, so that the search engines would read the content, but viewers would not), link farms, dodgy redirects, plus a plethora of other methods, all of which no longer work.
Today the search engines are wise to the tricks of unscrupulous webmasters. Their methods are generally labelled “black hat”, which is a term to describe any activity which a webmaster undertakes that has the potential to boost SERP results, while at the same times has inherent risks associated with it – usually having a website banned from the search engines completely if caught.
So, what is a webmaster to do now, in 2009, to gain positions in the SERPs, to beat the competition, to get the traffic? The answer is actually very simple – the problem is being able to actually implement it. What do I mean by this? Well, the search engines have devised new ways, new rules, new algorithms, to prevent black hat spammers from dominating the search engines results pages. What they do, is take into account the “authority” of a page. And to get “authority”, you need to be considered a leader in your field. And how does one do this? Easy:
- Build a Site Slowly
- Build a Good Reputation
- Develop a Brand
- Write Unique Content
- Build a Loyal Readership
- Build Trust
- Have Good Quality Sites Link to Your Site
The theory is simple, actually putting it into action is the hard part. What this means, is that well known brands have a good head start. Brands such as the BBC, AOL, Yahoo and Google, all perform well in the SERPs because people link to their content, because people trust them. If the BBC reports on a topical event, people believe it. The only way for a new company to compete effectively is to slowly build their site, their reader base, and build trust and respect, and win links from other sites.
How is this done? Through hard work. Marketing campaigns, both online and offline, advertising, participation in community events, sharing knowledge, being the first to report events, or offer new widgets etc. So, really this is all basic good business practice. And this is where the search engines have done a fantastic job, as proper businesses can now succeed online and stomp all over the spammy competition, as they are in it for the long term, building on sound management and decision making practices, rather than just spamming forums and blogs with their useless content.
Anyway, this post was going to be about the basics of SEO. So, what do you do on page to improve your rankings? This is simple too, although it involves getting your hands dirty, i.e. playing with the HTML of your website.
Simple Rules to Improve Search Engine Results – Onsite Optimisation:
1. Titles.
Ensure that each page has a relevant and unique Title element. The Title element is what appears in the web browser, and also what appears in the SERPs. Some poorly built sites have the same title for all pages, or even worse, titles such as “home”, “page 1″ and “blog”. These titles are useless, and hold your site back. Very few content management systems come with good SEO set up out of the box. Even Google’s Blogger templates need to be edited to get the most out of them.
2. Headers
The header elements are very useful in SEO. It is thought that each page should have a unique and relevant H1 element, i.e. the page heading. Now this is an area that I am still unsure about, as the way many CMS’s are built, the H1 element often includes the website name. I think that this is incorrect. For example, take a typical Blogger template. Here are the Header Elements:
h1: Blog name
h2: Date the blog post was written
h3: Subject of the blog.
Now, although this does provide a good hierarchy for the website, which may be what the search engines are looking for, it does seem strange to me that the subject of the blog, which is the most important piece of information for the user, comes in 3rd place, after the date and the name of the blog. If the blog name is “Bob’s Blabberings”, then this is given prominence over the subject, which could be “Interstellar Space Travel Made Easy” (for example). My feeling is that the Blogger templates, especially for the Blogspot blogs, are designed in a way to reduce the visibility of free blogs. I may be wrong here – and if anyone knows that I am, please tell me! But it just seems odd. I use Blogger for many of my sites, however I always remove the date from the H2 tag, and give the subject an H2 rating. However, on my static html pages, I never use the domain name in the title. It is not required.
So, in summary, use headers, but ensure that each header contains relevant keywords, even if that means ditching the domain name from the H1. Unless you are looking to build a very strong brand, then having the domain name in the H1 probably reduces your position in the SERPs.
3. Clean HTML
Another important consideration is good clean HTML in your website. In fact, all code should be clean, and ideally kept to a minimum. If your HTML is full of garbage, such as styles, javascript and tables, then the search engines have to make some form of judgement to strip out all of this useless information to find your content. There, external stylesheets, external javascript files, and CSS / external stylesheets are all essential to keeping the code to a minimum, and therefore ensuring that your content stands out. This is another change that I make to Blogger templates – removing the styles and placing them in an external stylesheet. If you look at the source code of a Blogspot blog (right click, view page source) you will see that the first half of the page is taken up with the styles. Seeing that the same styles are applied to each page, it is stupid to repeat this information on every page on the website. Why have 1000 (i.e. 1 for every page) when one stylesheet would suffice?
Another way to ensure that you have cleaner HTML is to move away from a tables based page layout, to CSS only. Tables add huge amounts of code to a page, whereas CSS removes all the code and places it out of the way where the search engines and viewers cannot see it (not unless they specifically look for it).
Another mistake people often make is leaving HTML comments in the code. If you buy, or download, a website template, it may come with comments describing the various sections, to enable you to make changes to the code. However, these comments clutter the page up (the source code), and can in theory slow some search engines, and annoy people using screen readers that do not ignore the comments. Also they can mess up keyword relevancy too, with some search engines. Remember, search engines read the source code. They do not behave like humans.
4. META Description and Keywords.
This is an interesting one to mention. It is generally accepted that most search engines ignore the META descriptions and keywords now, at least for search engines results. However, I believe that creating unique META keywords and descriptions can benefit a site. If you are able to add unique keywords and description to your pages easily, then I would suggest that it is advisable to do so. Many people say that it is not required, and that it makes no difference. However, if this really was the case, then why has Google added a duplicate META description checker tool to their Webmaster Tools? Tip: If it is easy to add a description, add it. If not, don’t bother!
5. Accessibility.
Accessibility is an area of web design often overlooked by people when configuring their sites for the purposes of SEO. However, good accessibility goes hand in hand with good onsite SEO. Why? The factors that make a site accessible to people with impaired vision, for example, also help the search engines. For example, one important feature of an accessible site is to have a “skip to content” link at the top of the page. This allows someone using a screen-reader to skip all the navigation, adverts and style code etc (if CSS is not implemented) to read the actual content of the page. If this link is not included, and if external stylesheets and .js files are not used, then someone using a screen-reader will have to trawl through all your garbage code, navigation, advertising scripts etc. before reaching the content that they came for. This not only puts people off, it also slows the journey of the search engines spiders on their journey through your site, as they navigate around all your clutter. A simple “skip to content”, plus “skip to navigation”, “skip to footer” etc. improve site navigation, spiderbility and ultimately SERPs. Again, this highlights the importance of external stylesheets. Get rid of the clutter, the garbage code, tidy the pages.
Content is King.
The most important factor is the content of a page. Content should be:
- Relevant
- Unique
- Well Written
- Keyword optimised.
Now, keyword stuffing your content is a bad idea, however, omitting keywords from a page is fatal (in SEO terms, you will not actually die, well, not unless your boss is really ruthless). Good “copy” should include all the keyword phrases that you think people will look for when searching the internet for you subject matter. However, over optimising can be bad, as the search engines will not trust a page that appears to be written for search engines, and not for people. Which is the key really, WRITE FOR PEOPLE. Sometimes so much emphasis is placed on improving a site for the search engines, the people a site is written for are forgotten. And when that happens, all trust is lost.
Good luck with your optimising. The final tip is simple: Less Is More. How you sell that theory to your boss is up to you, but overdoing SEO is bad for your health. As are most SEO Tools / packages. software etc. Do not waste your money on SEO software. At best the principals that it is built on are out of date, and at worse it will actually harm your search engine ranking. Final words: Common Sense.
