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Optimising A Site For Search Engine Results
There's more snake oil, misinformation and half-truths about SEs (Search Engines) and particularly SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) than just about any other topic in the web world. Not just my opinion, Google think so too.
So get this. There are no archaic secrets, no black arts, no voodoo, no way to buy yourself a better result by throwing money at Google. Paid-for advertising on any major SE makes no difference to your rankings.
How do I get really good search engine results?
Well, sites built to be easy to use for real people (which is Google's advice) generally perform pretty well in search engines.
So if your content is clear, concise and relevant to your target market, and the site is well-structured, built to meet modern design and accessibility standards, then the results should be pretty good.
Just so long as you follow a few simple rules. Like these...
What's so difficult about writing for the web?
Writing for the web is very different from print. Simple, often informal copy works better than buzzword-ridden marketing speak. People aren't stupid, nor do they normally want to read your press release.
The curse of 'click here.'
Don't title pages 'About Us.' Who the hell is 'Us' to a Search Engine? Use your keywords in your headings and sub-headings. So 'About Flying Solo Website Design' is a far better heading than 'About Me.'
And don't create links which say 'for more information, click here.' Again it's largely meaningless to a search engine and poor for accessibility. Much better to use 'for more information about web design' and make 'web design' the actual link text.
NB. Use your own keywords obviously; if you sell beer online, links about web design won't help me find you, a tragedy for both of us.
What's a 'keyword?'
Keywords - or more accurately, key phrases which should contain one or more keywords – should relate to what your customers or clients are searching for.
So on this site, keywords which perform well in searches are things like 'website designers Dundee,' 'Scottish web designers,' 'design consultancy Scotland' etc. You don't need each exact phrase in your copy, SEs can generally figure out the combinations themselves.
So these keywords should be in the content in your page, the headings, and things like the page title (the stuff at the top of your browser window, very important to SEs) and the text titles on links.
Try to consider every important page a 'micro-site' in itself, keep to one main topic per page.
So how much does it cost to optimise a site?
Depends on how well written your copy is for the web. I can help, and I know other people who can too. If you do it yourself, I'll give advice. If you're using Contribute or something similar to populate and/or update the site yourself, I'll show you the basics as part of the project cost.
Realistically, though, to do it properly takes time and effort, and neither of those are free in these parts.
Can you guarantee 'top-ten' results or whatever?
No. And neither can anyone else, as Google will confirm - in many cases, trying to 'spoof' the Search Engines does more harm than good. If you receive unsolicited email making such claims, bin it. (Client of mine who once took up such an offer found themselves surreptitiously linked to Japanese porn sites, not quite the audience they were hoping for).
Anything else I'm going to need?
Yes. Patience. If it's a new domain, it typically takes several months for SEs to 'rank' your site. Existing sites will be 'processed' more quickly; the current version of this site, which went 'live' in early 2006, was indexed in a few weeks, whereas a couple of new sites built in late 2005 took a lot longer.
But then this site's a known quantity; it's been here for the best part of a decade and has numerous incoming links from other sites. (Google in fact places new domains on a kind of probationary period).
Are incoming links important?
Yes. One of the factors which affect SE rankings is 'link popularity.' The more 'relevant' sites which link to yours the better, particularly if they're from highly-ranked, popular sites. Note 'relevant' is the key factor, links generated via 'link-farm' techniques will do more harm than good, so again any offers suggesting you'll be linked to 10,000 sites for only 25 dollars should be binned immediately.
So if there are trade directories/industry listings sites you can use do so, reciprocal links with clients or appropriate related sites can be valuable.
What about all the other search engines?
The 'big four' are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and AOL Search. Between them, these account for 75 - 95% of all searches, depending on which stats you read. The other important one, which not many non-web professionals will have heard of, is the DMOZ Open Directory Project, currently supplying additional search results to AOL Search, Ask Jeeves, Google, Lycos & Netscape Search.
At the moment it costs nothing to submit your site to any of these, although Yahoo has a '7 Day Express Listing' service ($299) which can be worthwhile for new sites.
Just to complicate things further, there are some directories for which there’s no need - or even process - to list your site. If your site has a number of relevant links in from other sites, these ‘crawler’ based directories will find and list you anyway.