Practical On Page SEO
Introduction
Customers often ask us to make sure their pages are search engine friendly. Some long time marketers bring up meta tags and other ideas very popular a few years back. We know they don’t work. So we’ve spent a fair amount of time researching what matters today.
Notice that this page’s title includes the phrase “On Page”. This article does not address Off Page Search Engine Optimization or linking strategies, which should be an important part of your Internet strategy today.
The book at right is a nice overview of SEO. Worth taking a look at. Questions? Please contact us!
Design for the Big Three Engines
Statistics vary on the number of search engines people use (up to 2,000), but everyone pretty much agrees who the leaders are: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Of those, Google is currently the most important. When thinking about On Page SEO, design for these three and ignore the others. There are very few exceptions to this rule. More importantly, there are consequences to not following it. For example, if you modify your site in a way that successfully manipulates a smaller engine into placing it higher, your behavior could get you out and out banned from The Big Three.
On Page SEO Fundamentals
Meaningful titles. Make sure that each page on your site has a meaningful title. A title that simply says “FastWebUpdates.com”, for example, isn’t meaningful. A title that says “Website Maintenance Services - FastWebUpdates.com” is better.
Text as text, not images. I still find a lot of websites with text imprisoned in an image. Search engines can’t ready this text so they can’t index it. You’re better off switching it back to text even if it impacts the visual appear of your design.
Site maps. Adding a plain text map to your site is a good way to get search engines to crawl a bit deeper than they otherwise might. List all of the pages on your site in an ordered fashion. Don’t worry about making all of the links look pretty.
Good link anchor text. Instead of writing “click here” and putting a link around it, use meaningful anchor text. For example, since FastWebUpdates.com is all about website maintenance, a link to us should surround that phrase.
Actual content. Make sure each page includes actual content. About 200 words per page is enough for a search engine.
Clear headlines. Divide your text up into smaller chunks using reasonably short headlines that include your target keywords.
Use Flash etc sparsely. Flash is great for drawing attention to a part of your site, but isn’t great for presenting content to a search engine. You’re better off using it as a seasoning than as a main course.
Avoid Spending Money on Old Tricks
(Resistance is not futile.)
Meta tags. Search engines don’t use them much, if at all. The meta description tags are sometimes used to create the short text underneath a search engine result, but that’s it.
Hidden text and pages. These can get you outright banned, which takes months to recover from.
Duplicate pages. The Big Three are getting better and better at ferreting out duplicates pages and excluding them from their directories.
Javascript rewrites and jump pages. These can get you outright banned again. Just don’t do it.
Outbound links to Link Farms. Links farms are just what they sounds like–sites full of largely unrelated links. When you add an outbound link to one, your site might actually be penalized.
Don’t Worry Too Much About…
Dynamic pages. Some search engines are better at following dynamic pages than others. They’re all getting better. If you’re using any software commonly found on the web today, you’re probably fine. Even the old Wextra (”Give your website something extra–Wextra!”) that I put out a few years back was friendly enough to search engines that they could handle indexing the content.
Non HTML documents — Word, PowerPoint, PDF, etc. The Big Three are all very capable of reading these.