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Seo 101 - Basic Optimization Techniques
By Jim Hedger, Fri Dec 23rd
It is hard to believe the all too short northern summer isalmost over. In less than two weeks, kids will be going back toschool and commercial webmasters will be gearing up for theautumn and winter sales seasons. This is as good a time as any,perhaps better than most, to cover 101, the basic techniquesthat form the foundation to an advanced or SEM campaign. For the purposes of brevity this piece starts with a fewassumptions. The first assumption is a single, small businesssite is being worked on. The second assumption is that the sitein question is written using a fairly standard mark-up languagesuch as HTML or PHP. The last assumption is that some form ofkeyword research and determination has already taken place andthe webmaster is confident in the selection of keyword targets. Believe it or not, basic is all about common sense andsimplicity. The purpose of search engine optimization is to makea website as search engine friendly as possible. It's really notthat difficult. Basic doesn't require specialized knowledgeof algorithms, programming and taxonomy but it does require abasic understanding of how search engines work. There are twoaspects of search engines to consider before jumping in. Thefirst is how spiders work. The second is how search enginesfigure out what documents relate to which keywords and phrases.
In the simplest terms, search engines collect data about aunique website by sending an electronic spider to visit the siteand copy its content which is stored in the search engine'sdatabase. Generally known as 'bots', these spiders are designedto follow links from one document to the next. As they copy andassimilate content from one document, they record links and sendother bots to make copies of content on those linked documents.This process continues ad infinitum. By sending out spiders andcollecting information 24/7, the major search engines haveestablished databases that measure their size in the tens ofbillions. Every day, both Yahoo and Google claim to spider asmuch data as is contained in the US Library of Congress (approx.150 million items). Knowing the spiders and how they read information on a site isthe technical end of basic SEO. Spiders are designed to readsite content like you and I read a newspaper. Starting in thetop left hand corner, a spider will read site content line byline from left to right. If columns are used (as they are inmost sites), spiders will follow the left hand column to itsconclusion before moving to central and right hand columns. If aspider encounters a link it can follow, it will record that linkand send another bot to copy and record data found on thedocument the link leads to. The spider will proceed through thesite until it records everything it can possible find there. As spiders follow links and record everything in their paths,one can safely assume that if a link to a site exists, a spiderwill find that site. Webmasters and SEOs no longer need tomanually or electronically submit their sites to the majorsearch engines. The search spiders are perfectly capable offinding them on their own, provided a link to that site existssomewhere on the web. Google and Yahoo both have an uncannyability to judge the topic or theme of documents they areexamining, and use that ability to judge the topicalrelationship of documents that are linked together. The mostvaluable incoming links (and the only ones worth perusing), comefrom sites that share topical themes. Once a search spider finds your site, helping it get around isthe first priority. One of the most important basic tips isto provide clear paths for spiders to follow from "point A" to"point Z" in your website. This is best accomplished byproviding easy to follow text links directed to the mostimportant pages in the site at the bottom of each document. Oneof these text links should lead to a text-based sitemap, whichlists and provides a text link to every document in the site.The sitemap can be the most basic page in the site as itspurpose is more to direct spiders than help lost site visitors,though designers should keep site visitors in mind when creatingthe sitemap. Here is an example of the basic sitemap(http://www.stepforth.com/company/sitemap.htm) used on theStepForth site. Google also accepts more advanced, XML basedsitemaps, providing a wealth of information on their Sitemap FAQpage(https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html). Allowing spiders free access to the entire website is not alwaysdesirable. Good SEOs should also know how to tell spiders thatsome site content is off limits and should not be added to theirdatabase using robots.txt (http://www.robotstxt.org/) files.Last week, Mike Banks Valentine of Website101(http://www.website101.com/) wrote a good overview on how towrite and use robots.txt files in his article, "Search EngineSpiders Lost Without Guidance - Post This Sign!"(http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2005/aug/22.html) Offering spiders access to the areas of the site one wants themto access is half the battle. The other half is found in thesite content. Search engines are supposed to provide their userswith lists of documents that relate to user entered keywordphrases or queries. Search engines need to determine which ofbillions of documents is relevant to a small number of specificwords. In order to do this, the search engine needs to know yoursite relates to those words. There
are four basic areas, or elements, a search engine looksat when examining a document. After the URL of a site, the firstinformation a search spider records is the title of the site.Next, it examines the Description Meta tag. Both of theseelements are found in the section of the source code. Titles should be written using the strongest keyword targets asthe foundation. StepForth's primary keyword target is SearchEngine Placement. A glance at our index page shows that phraseis used as the first three words in our site title. Some titlesare written using two or three basic two-keyword phrases. A keyto writing a good title is to remember that human readers willsee the title as the reference link on the search engine resultspage. Don't overload your title with keyword phrases.Concentrate on the strongest keywords that best describe thetopic of the document content. The Description Meta tag is also fairly important. Searchengines tend to use it to gather information on the topic ortheme of the document. A well written Description is phrased intwo or three complete sentences with the strongest keywordphrases woven early into each sentence. As with the title tag,some search engines will display the Description on the searchresults pages, generally using it in whole or in part to providethe text that appears under the reference link. Some searchengines place minor weight in the Keywords Meta tag however, itis not advisable to spend a lot of time worrying about thekeywords tag. After reading information found in the section ofthe source code, spiders continue on to examine site content. Itis wise to remember that spiders read the same way we do, leftto right and following columns. Good content is the most important aspect of search engineoptimization. The easiest and most basic rule of the trade isthat search engine spiders can be relied upon to read basic bodytext 100% of the time. By providing a search engine spider withbasic text content, SEOs offer the engines information in theeasiest format for them to read. While some search engines canstrip text and link content from Flash files, nothing beatsbasic body text when it comes to providing information to thespiders. Very good SEOs can almost always find a way to workbasic body text into a site without compromising the designer'sintended look, feel and functionality. The content itself should be thematically focused. In otherwords, keep it simple. Some documents cover multiple topics oneach page, which is confusing for spiders and SEOs alike. Thebasic rule here is if you need to express more than onetopic on a page, you need more pages. Fortunately, creating newpages with unique topic-focused content is one of the most basicSEO techniques, making a site simpler for both live-users andelectronic spiders. An important caveat is to avoid duplicatecontent and the temptation to construct doorway pagesspecifically designed for search placements. When writing document content, try to use the strongest keywordtargets early in the copy. For example, a site selling theubiquitous Blue Widget might use the following as alead-sentence; "Blue Widgets by Widget and Co. are the strongestconstruction widgets available and are the trusted widget ofleading builders and contractors." The primary target is obviously construction applications forthe blue widget. By placing the keyword phrases "blue widgets","construction widgets" and "trusted widget" along side otherkeywords such as the singular words, "strongest", "trusted" and"builders" and "contractors", the sentence is crafted to helpthe search engine see a relationship between these words.Subsequent sentences would also have keywords and phrases weavedinto them. One thing to keep in mind when writing basic copyis that unnecessary repetition of keywords is often consideredspam by search engines. Another thing to remember is thatultimately, the written copy is meant to be read by human eyesas well as search spiders. Each page or document in the siteshould have its own unique content. The last on-site element a spider examines when reading the site(and later relating the content to user queries), is the anchortext used in internal links. Using relevant keyword phrases inthe anchor text is a basic technique aimed at solidifyingthe search engine's perception of the relationship betweendocuments and the words used to phrase the link. A good exampleis found on towards the bottom of pages in the StepForth site(http://stepforth.com/). Note the use of the words "placementservices", "seo results", "SEO Faq" and the topic of theinternal pages these links point to. In a nutshell, that's pretty much it to the basics of clean,search engine friendly SEO. The foundation of nearly everysuccessful campaign is simplicity. The goal is to make asite easy to find, easy to follow, and easy to read for searchspiders and live-visitors, with well written topical content anda fair number of relevant incoming links. While basic can betime consuming in the early stages, the results are almostalways worth it and set the stage for more advanced future work. About the author:Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketingexpert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time forStepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search EngineDatabase. He has worked as an for over 5 years and welcomesthe opportunity to share his experience through interviews,articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at jimhedger@stepforth.com
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