Search Engine Friendly
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of constructing and tweaking a website so that it will appear higher in the search engine results for a particular search term. Since the closer to the top of the list a site appears, the more likely the user will click on the link. It's a great way to generate traffic that will hopefully result in sales. This is an important point. However, just having a site that appears at or near the top in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) will do little good if the visitor immediately leaves the site. An attractive, well laid out site that contains the information the visitor is looking for is at least, if not more important than the SERP position. Sites that compete in highly competitive markets can still produce good results by utilizing Pay Per Click advertising, as well as traditional advertising and promotion. Sites that don't appeal to their target market can't hope to accomplish their goals. Visitors just won't stick around long enough for any of the benefits of having a website to possibly be realized!
For this very reason the most important rule to keep in mind when building a site is that it needs to appeal to the target visitor before all else. This means, but is not limited to...
- Plenty of Good Well Written Information.
- Simple Navigation.
- Attractive Design.
- High Quality Images and Illustrations.
While attractive design and high quality imagery may not help directly when the search engines spider, or scan a website, attractive easy to use sites are more likely to be linked to by other sites. Inbound links, as we'll see in a short bit are helpful in showing up higher in the results. Simple navigation and lots of written information, on the other hand, will be attractive to not only other sites that are looking for links their visitors are interested in, but to the search engines as well. The goal of a search engine is to produce relevant search results for their visitors. While search engines can't evaluate imagery, text is easily evaluated, ranked, and cataloged. For this reason, when it comes to SEO, content is KING!
Now that we have plenty of good content for the search engines to sink their teeth into all that's left is to organize, tweak and mark it up so the search engines will better be able to digest the data. The following are some important steps to get this done.
Title each page using keywords: Each page needs to have a unique title that reflects the content of that particular page. Titles can be up to 65 characters in length. The first words carry more weight than the trailing words, so it's good to put the most important keywords up front. Company and organization names should typically appear on the end, space permitting.
Links done right: Links need to have the proper text for maximum effectiveness. When evaluating a link search engines look at the link text (commonly referred to as anchor text). Anchor text that reads “digital SLR camera” is much better than one that reads “click here”. The reason this is important is that search engines use links to help determine how good a site is. The reasoning is that pages that are linked to more often are better than ones that have few links. The good thing is that while links from outside the website are great, links from within a set also count. For this reason links need to contain meaningful anchor text.
Keywords count: When writing body copy, page titles, link text, and headers it is important to include important keywords. This is especially true for the page titles, link text, and headers as these are given a little more weight in determining how high a particular page will appear. The body copy should be in the neighborhood of 500 – 800 words with keywords being repeated a few times but not too often as to not appear spammy. The body text is also a good place to include links to other pages in the site where appropriate as body text is valued by the search engines.
What about the meta tags? At one time meta tags were an important part in making a a site rank well. Now they play little, if any, part in determining rankings. That said, the most important meta tag is the “description” meta tag . It's useful because it is sometimes displayed as the page description on the search engine results page. Because of this, if is a good idea to write it like ad copy to entice the potential visitor to click on the link. The second, less valuable, type of meta tag is the “keywords” tag. Ignored by most search engines because of keyword stuffing abuse in the past, it is though to help a little sometimes in Yahoo so it doesn't hurt to ad some unique keywords for each page.
In Summary
When building a successful site it's important to keep the search engines in mind since for nearly all sites this is where most of the traffic comes from. The search engines in turn like to see lots of content so that they can offer the most relevant links for their visitors. A site with plenty of well marked up content will fare much better than a site that has little content. Also problematic are sites that don't take advantage of the proper markup techniques that search engines like to see. Finally, sites containing mainly Flash content or images are difficult to get to rank well because search engines can only interpret text, not images.
At Bradley & Company we adhere to the above principles and techniques. This makes it easy for search engines to interpret and categorize our sites so that they perform well in the rankings for our customers. Once a visitor has landed on one of our attractive easy to use sites they'll more likely become a customer. This, of course, is the ultimate goal!
