Introduction
There are a lot of misconceptions with regards to search engine optimisation and website promotion. There are always a lot of questions asked and a multitude of answers given in response. In my opinion, a lot of people get it completely wrong. In this article I aim to provide an ethical and achievable approach to website promotion.
Whatever people do say about SEO and website optimisation, they will invariably talk about Google – with around 64% of the US internet search market (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10354394-75.html) and I would estimate around 60% of the UK search market, Google is the most important target for webmasters and website owners.
History of Search Indexing and Website Optimisation
In the early days of search algorithms and website promotion, Google and other search engines used to rely primarily on user-controlled content indicators such as keyword meta-tags and description meta-tags as well as the content of the page itself. I have no doubt that this began as an effective method of indexing and ordering sites. On the surface it would seem like a simple and effective approach to data indexing.
However, as the internet became more competitive as an advertising space, people began to understand these primitive indexing methods and to take advantage of them. A multitude of “hacks” and backdoor techniques were discovered and abused by people who wanted to get to the top of the results.
Since then Google’s algorithms have become incredibly complicated, and I would argue that filtering out illegitimate results from the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) will be almost as great a concern as displaying significant results has been in the past. Because of this, covert SEO techniques will soon become fruitless.
If you really want to be ranked in Google and other search engines, you need to produce good quality websites with well written, useful and well researched content. There is no working the system any more.
The only thing you need to understand about Google is their goal: to provide the end-user with a page or pages that contains rich information on the keyword or phrase that they typed into the search engine.
How Search Engine Optimisation SHOULD Be Done:
Content
Content is without a doubt the MOST important part of SEO – Google is looking to promote interesting and useful websites. Make sure your content is well researched and well written. Don’t copy information from other sites, write it yourself, make it original and interesting. Whilst it is a no no to deliberately flood your content with keywords, it is worth considering what the popular phrases are in your search market; Wordtracker is a great tool for doing this as it gives you an idea of search volume for any keyword or phrase. Keywords within an article are like tags that make something findable. The choice of these tags can determine the popularity of the page.
Coding
Getting the content right takes care of the end-user – it gives them a good experience and makes your site worth visiting. The next most important SEO technique is the coding behind your site. Google, unlike the end-user, has to crawl through the source code of your website and in the same way that clear, well formatted content is easy to read for a visitor, clean code is good for the search engine. W3C has a great validator to check that your html code is valid. This is not only important for the search engines, but also because valid code is much more likely to work in the variety of web-browsers out there. Make good use of stylesheets and externalise any scripts that you can. This not only means Google has less work to do in sifting through your pages, but also that the page size will be small and thus the crawl rate will be faster. The cleaner the code, the easier it will be for Google to crawl. Make use of title tags, heading tags and paragraph your text correctly.
Navigation
Take great consideration when building your navigation system. Think about how the user will get from page to page. They should be able to find all the information on your site easily, and it should be just as easy to get back to the home page. Creating good navigation will help the user and you will be favoured by the search engines as it will make your site easy to index.
Listening to Google
It is a popular belief that Google is overly secretive in its approach to search and uncooperative to webmasters – in actual fact Google will tell you everything you need to know to be favoured in the results and making good use of this information is a must. Google Webmaster tools is a great place to start. Submitting a sitemap here will prompt Google to crawl your site and any errors found will be posted after Google has done the crawl. Any errors should be monitored and fixed accordingly. Google also publishes webmaster guidelines that will tell you exactly what they like and don’t like.
Linking
Despite popular belief, brash link building and multiple directory submissions are a bad idea. It can have detrimental effects on your listings if Google considers that you are linking to “bad neighbourhoods” or inferior sites. Further more if you are linked to from hundreds of irrelevant and obscure sites these links will be ignored anyway.
Aside from this, if you fill your links page with hundreds of random links as part of a mass link-exchange program, it is of no use to anyone.
In my opinion, link building is the least important technique. Forget about page rank and consider what a links page is ACTUALLY ABOUT: you are giving your visitors resources that they may find useful. If you come across a site that you find interesting, add it to your links page – ask them for a link back – its all part of the networking process, but it shouldn’t be a necessity that they link back to you. You are providing your visitors with the link because you think the site is useful.
John O’Nolan couldn’t have summarised link building better in a recent Web Squeeze article when he wrote: “Link building is dead, we are now in the era of reputation building”.
Summary
These are what I consider to be the 5 most important points to consider when optimising your website. There are loads of other techniques you can employ but there’s really no point employing them until you have considered and implemented the points above. They will give you a great foundation for your website.
This is a great summary of ethical SEO. It’s really not about tricks and gaming the system. Search engines are getting better and better at figuring out what visitors want from a good website, so you need to build a useful, quality resource.
The only thing I would add is to be wary of a single-minded focus when it comes to traffic sources. Google may hold the lion’s share of the search market, but it’s not a good idea to depend on them for all of your traffic. You never know when they might turn off the spigot.
Great article David, agree with all of it!
“Google is the most important target
for webmasters”
I have no idea how to target specific search engines, how is this done? Is there one rule for one SE and another rule for the others? I thought that if you followed common SEO principles, you would be targeting all of them.
Thanks
Good article, although the title is a misnomer: this doesn’t cover website promotion as a whole, only SEO. There’s often much more to be done, such as posting announcements on community sites.
A note of realism on “clean code”: Googlebot is smart and hard-working. It won’t attempt to index the contents of [style] or [script] blocks (although it might sometimes check them for naughty SEO tricks), and it won’t easily be discouraged by bulky or invalid code.
You shouldn’t have a problem unless your HTML file is absurdly huge, or your markup is severely mangled. Moreover, Google is not going to reward good code or penalise sloppy code: it just wants to form an accurate representation of the page content.
Clean and valid code is good for other reasons, but it’s no talisman for SEO.
@Jacob.R:
You don’t need to target particular search engines. Although the rankings will always differ between them (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot), the best approach is to follow basic principles that will work for all search engines. In other words, follow the sensible advice in this article (and indeed in John’s).
The only way to target them would be to send them different pages. This is a perilous tactic, as search engines are sensitive to being given “tampered” content. A typical trick is to send a keyword-stuffed page to Google, instead of the normal page that users see. BMW did this, and Google blacklisted them. Attempts to target particular search engines are treading on the same ground, and risk similar penalties.
Thanks for all the comments!! Much appreciated.
Sorry about the title, looking at it again it should really be “A Guide to SEO/Search Engine Optimisation” – at the time thought promotion looked neater gramatically:)
When I said I would target Google, I dont be at the expense of NOT targeting any other search engine/source, I really meant that I would speak mostly about Google, and use techniques that I know sit well specifically with Google – obviously its important to target other search engines – Although not much will change as people have said, if you follow these general SEO guidelines you will find it suites all search engines well.
Regarding coding, I wont argue the point, but I do concider it an important step – as you say, size is a concideration and to keep the page size down is important – I recently shaved about a third off my page size by cleaning up the code – externalising styles and scripts.
Also, if you concider that Googles “robot” has to use an algorithm to go through the code on your site, errors could cause issues there.
Aside from that, obviously noone knows Googles exact methods, but it really WOULDNT surprise me if Google conciders code validity in its ordering process – when you think of all the other things it conciders, if I were ordering sites and really trying to sift the good from the bad, its something I would take into concideration – its just another thing that shows effort is being taken with the site.
As an example – I recently cleaned up one of my sites (shareworld.co.uk) I done ALOT of work on cleaning up the code, running the site through W3C validator, I also spent some time correcting errors flagged up on webmaster tools, but since then I have seen almost a 40% increase in traffic and serps.
I wont go on, but I will be doing some follow up articles to this one.
Thanks again for all comments, its great that people are reading it, and I welcome everyones views!!
Although I don’t see much SEO benefit, this kind of work is great for speeding up your website (see my Yslow article). Users will appreciate it.
Well, this looks like a list of the basic things to keep in mind when preparing or making your website SEO ready plus a few tips on how to get started with your SEO. Thanks for posting this though. Really helpful for those who are just getting started or would like to transition their website to make it SEO ready
Great ideas. I don’t know why some webmasters continue to build links at random. Quality and relevance is always first when it comes to content, as well as off page efforts like link building. Google has been wise to random mass generated link building strategies for quite some time.
Well said about the linking, Google checks to see if sites linking to you and being linked to by you to see if they are related in someway, this is how it judges if you links are useful to visitors. This can be hard for some businesses because of competition, but its possible to do, e.g. if you make blue widgets, you could link to sites about widget history etc.
That’s a nice, ‘concise’ way of saying that “Here are the 5 ways to SEO”. But I hope I can disagree. There’s more to SEO than just content, coding, navigation, google and linking.
The “in” thing (in my opinion) nowadays is LOCAL!
If you aren’t in local, you aren’t in global too.
However, I agree with the remaining 4 elements of SEO. Thanks for a great post.
Website Promotion Specialist – yes your right! I use local for my sites – in particular a computer repair company and we get LOADS of traffic from Google local. Sorry I missed that out of the article, just didnt want to get into it!!! I will be publishing some follow ups soon though and will include it there.
Thanks everyone
It is good article but you should get rid from some comments from people who use signature as keyword anchor (keyword spam).
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