Performance & Maintenance

Search Engine Optimisation: KEYWORDS

During the Design Process

Keyword Targeting.

Deciding what keywords should be targeted: An important feature in search engine optimisation (seo) is the use of keywords. Whilst it's difficult to second guess web surfer's search terms, we can know for certain that people looking for our site/product stand a better chance of finding our site if we choose the correct keywords. Assistance from friends and associates may help but choosing actual specific keywords will improve our chances manyfold.

Competitive Keywords do not Convert.

Scenario: I write software to sell on my website. If I used the word software as a keyword, a prospective client "googling" the word software receives 6,120,000,000 results. Mine may well be in position 2739 or worse. Obviously my potential client neither finds nor purchases my software. A specific keyword phrase such as "Campbells Teach Your Kids Algebra Software" and/or subsets of this phrase would deliver a much more specific set of results rendering your clients a far greater chance of finding and purchasing the product they desire; your Algebra software.

The use of 1 - 3 highly specific keywords is the most effective method of connecting to your desired clientelle, also eliminating the wasted bandwidth of hundreds of visitors who are totally disinterested in teaching algebra to children.

Keywords: Signposts to Content

Keywords must be Visible Words.

We need to assign keywords that can not only be read by search engine robots but also by any humans that venture to our domain. Whilst it behooves us to utilise site specific terms as keywords/keyphrases we ALSO need to put our keywords where both the search engines and the human visitors can locate them. Keywords are signposts to content and thus show the way to the content your visitor is seeking.

Domain Domination.

Your domain name is your first obvious signpost to your content. If your name is Olive and you sell rocket launchers, using olive.com is not a good choice, whereas olive-rocket-launchers.com perfectly describes both your company name and your product. If you were a household name like Canon, for example, Canon.com makes sense, but a fledgeling company would be better off using canon-printers.com instead till they became well known, thus both seach bots and humans benefit. (NB: The use of underscores as a word delimiter in a domain name makes no difference to humans but many search engines cannot read them and so the use of an hyphen is preferable). Nevertheless, Canon.com should target printers as a keyword even though it's not in the domain name because the term printers will appear on the canon.com printers page headings and probably in the folder names of the link.

In fact, a google search for printers reveals canon.com.au in second place behind PC World magazine printer buying guide.

Heading for a Title.

Page titles are the next obvious signpost; titles must reflect page content. Furthermore, the use of descriptive page headings (H1-H7) direct both bots and visitors to your content. Headings are a favourite with search engines as the people who write search engine algorithms recognise that headings logically reflect the content of the following paragraph(s) especially H1 which gets a higher ranking than a H2 etc in descending order of magnitude.

Anchors Aweigh.

Links (a href or anchor) to an internal or external page should describe the intended destination and thus are another excellent item begging the inclusion of keywords. Within the search engine algorithm, anchors carry more weight than ordinary text as, again, they are signposts, although having said that, paragraphs, lists, and any other form of page text should contain the keywords which are the intended destination of the signposts.

The most likely page text to be indexed is within the first 1-2 paragraphs of each page.

Popular Offsite Links Equate Big Ranking

Reciprocating Motion within Search Engines.

By far the most effective method of achieving a better search engine page ranking is to get incoming links to your site from pages that have a high search engine page rank. Both the number of these and the quality rate heavily in search engine algorithms meaning that if you can get reciprocating links (to and from) you can benefit greatly if the other site is highly ranked and both of you benefit if both of you are also highly ranked.

DaVinci Code.

Neither human visitors to your site can unravel the depths of occluded encryption so keep your code working by ensuring that it contains valid XHTML or at least valid HTML. An invalid page may not be read by search engine bots and at best it runs the risk of being misinterpreted. If search engines can't read it, chances are your visitors, assuming you have any, won't be able to read it either. Don't forget Google and other search engines ususaly view pages like a screen reader.

Dire Directories.

Folders otherwise known as directories, are another signpost ideal for lacing with keywords. When directory names are required within links you now have the keyword of the page name and the keyword of the directory BOTH within the link. This naming of directories with appropriate keywords permits both search bots and people (assuming they can view it in their status bar when links are moused over) to correctly ascertain the contents of folders and destination of links.

Let's play Meta Tag.

It is said that most search engines, excepting Yahoo don't apply any weighting to meta tags within their algorithms, and even Yahoo allocates very little weight. However, meta tags are a record for the site designer showing what their meta tags are, so returning to the site after months without updates one has a convenient onsite catalogue of keywords applied. Compare these with the server statistics to see if any still apply and change appropriately.

The meta description tag IS the description that appears in the search engine results page so make it a very brief summary of the page's main content.

Robots Reading Text.

It is a good idea to include a robots.txt file on your server to disallow some or all content; content you wish to keep private. Robots.txt written in two parts tells firstly which (or all) robots can/cannot index the pages and then indicates which pages (or all) may not be indexed. If you don't have permission on your server to apply a robots.txt you can use the robots meta tag <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> and <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW"> within a page's header to prevent an html document from being indexed and its links remaining unparsed. You should note that neither robots.txt nor robot meta tags will prevent malicious robots from indexing your page and parsing its links as they simply ignore these directions.

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After Uploading your site

DMOZ Site Directory.

After you've uploaded to your server, you may want to list your site on the DMOZ directory; see DMOZ and Add to DMOZ if you wish to add your site to this huge online directory. (NB Only finished sites should be entered, half finished sites are unacceptable). Sites are entered by humans who check to see that it fits with the site description prior to inclusion. Search engines rate sites higher if they are included in directories, especially DMOZ.

Adding Adwords.

If you don't mind spending money, having adwords on other sites or appearing in relevant search results, and nowdays in gmail messages, can increase your visibility opportunities by making your site visible in more places on the web; see Adwords (If you open a gmail account you can find out how much your keywords are worth and thus estimate the viability of an adwords campain).

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Validate your Success

Results of your Search Engine Campaign.

It usually takes about six months to get settled into the search engine results (although you may be in an individual search engine much earlier although not necessarily in a prime position), so how do we know if anyone has visited our site (apart from sales which may or may not indicate the number of visitors) without getting everyone to leave a "note"? We can set a javascript visitor counter; scripts are available on most javascript websites which record the number of visitors who come to your pages although most people clock these up artificially in an attempt to make their site appear more popular. Tsk tsk.

Serving up Logs.

If you pay a host for space on a server you probably have access to server logs which tell you not only how many visitors you've had to your site, but to which pages, how long they stayed, if they went to another of your pages upon leaving your page, which country the visitor comes from and which operating system they use, etc, and most importantly for our current purposes, if your visitors found your site via a search engine the logs tell us their choice of search criteria.

Well that's it for now. Later on in the year we'll write a report on the effectiveness of our seo campaign, although we've got only about two more months till our course ends. Check back often to see what's happening as this "site" progresses AND don't forget to link to this page or others in this site, especially if you have a high search engine page rank for the linking page.

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