Originally Published: August 2004
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the longest running challenges in e-marketing. Since the inception of the World Wide Web, and the subsequent invention of the search engine, marketers have been trying to figure out just how sites get ranked. The major problem has been the dynamic nature of search engine rankings, and their constantly changing ranking methods, which is intentional. But, there are some basic techniques you can implement to improve your rankings, and it begins with a thorough understanding of how your site and keywords appear to search engine ranking spiders.
Where do you stand?
The first step to optimizing your website is to evaluate your site and keywords by searching with the most popular search engines. This is the quickest and easiest way to see how well your site performs with the search engines. You can also reference two free, online tools that offer very important site information – Google’s PageRank and Alexa.com.
Google PageRank
Download at: http://toolbar.google.com/
Google PageRank (PR) is a ranking system that gives a webpage a score of PR0 to PR10, with PR10 being the highest possible rank. PR ranks each individual page, not the entire site, and the ranking takes into account links to your site (backlinks) and dynamic, relevant site content. For example, PR gives an incoming link a “vote” in favor of your page (i.e. links from page A to page B are a “vote” for page B). Google describes how its PageRank system works as, “using [a web page’s] vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value.” In addition to links, another major plus for PR ranking is a blog (or web log). Blogs have very strong PageRanks because they improve link exchanging, provide relevant, up-to-date content, and attract natural and unreciprocated links. Blogs can regularly achieve a PR4 or PR5 ranking within just a couple of months. However, don’t confuse Google PageRank with search engine rankings; they are two distinctly different things. Search engine rankings are the actual positions in which your site appears in the Google search list. But, PageRank is a number that Google uses to aid in ranking its search listings. It is intended to give you guidance in evaluating the potential strength of your web site as a candidate for search engine ranking. The higher the PageRank, the better chance your site has of a high search rank on Google.
Alexa.com
Download at: http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi
Another good source of site ranking evaluation is Alexa.com. Alexa bases its rankings on unique visitors to your site and page views. Alexa’s premise is that the higher the unique visitors and page views, the better your site looks to search engines. Alexa also provides important traffic details, like the number of links that point to your page. It even provides a list of all the links so you can see exactly who is linking to your site. By knowing the number of visitors, page views, links and Google PageRank, you will have a pretty good idea of how effectively your site is being viewed and interpreted by the search engines.
Typical Site Design Problems
Once you determine where you currently stand with the search engines, it is important to understand the most common causes of poor rankings. Causes include: frames webpage design, unnecessary code or code that does not comply with W3C standards, Flash-only websites and dynamic pages. The most common of these causes is the use of frames. Search engine spiders can crawl through a frames-based design, but they cannot identify interior pages correctly. The result of such crawling is very unpredictable and can lead to a poor search ranking. In addition to frames, programming a page with a lot of unnecessary code can be troublesome to spiders. All code must be developed in full compliance with W3C standards. JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets should be referenced in a source file. This helps spiders find important information and ranking details on the page quickly and easily. In fact, some spiders stop after they crawl to 100K. Another common problem is the development of Flash-only websites. Spiders tend to reward sites that are user-friendly, and they view Flash as an inconvenience. For example, say you have a website featuring many types of furniture and you have a Flash movie introduction and use Flash throughout the site. Let’s say one of your products is an Italian leather sofa. If a visitor were to search for Italian leather sofas on Google.com and then visit your site, he or she would have to wade through your entire Flash movie to get to Italian leather sofas. Search engines don’t appreciate this inconvenience, so they tend to rank Flash sites lower. Finally, the use of dynamic pages is a problem because spiders will not follow long, complicated URLs.
Site Optimization Suggestions:
Meta tags – use them to specify your keywords and descriptions.
Page title – make sure to include your keywords in your page titles. To improve rankings, the title and keywords should very closely match the content of the page.
Content – make the content relevant to the title and include keywords and links throughout the page. Be sure to put your interesting, content rich pages early in the site as spiders don’t like to dig too deep to get to your important keyword-rich content.
Links – use links throughout your content pages and include keywords in the links themselves.
Keywords – make sure you have strong keyword density throughout the site.
Alt tags – spiders will read the alt tags of images, so it is important to list your keywords for each image in the alt tag. However, please note that spiders will only pay attention to relevant keywords, so don’t put every one of your keywords in every alt tag.
HTML validity is very important.
Website accessibility and site architecture – your site should be easily navigable and each page should link back to the homepage. Homepage linking makes it easy for spiders to crawl down the entire architecture of your site.
The number of pages currently indexed in the major online directories is important.
The number of sites linking to you (backlinks) is also very important as search engines use this information to gauge the relative importance of your site.
Not every link is created equal. Those backlinks that have a good reputation help improve your rankings. Poorly rated backlinks will pull down your rankings because it looks like you are trying to fool the spiders.
The relevancy of your backlinks page content to the content on your site is important. Search engines do not want you to randomly gather links to your site; instead, they want you to have backlinks for pages relevant to your content. For example, if you are ESPN and weather.com links to you, the search engines will not be impressed, but a link from NFL.com is seen as very beneficial.
Dynamic site design with constantly-updated, relevant content also helps because it shows the search engines that people will gain important information by visiting your site.
Blogs – The fresh content and high Google PageRank of blogs get many of them crawled by spiders on a daily basis, which can significantly help your rankings.
Sitemap – Spiders love sitemaps as they use them to quickly access every page of your site. Make sure to include descriptive text for each link in the sitemap and put a link to the map on your homepage; this makes it as easy as possible for the spiders.
Offenses Deemed “Ban-able” by Search Engines
Now that you know how to effectively optimize your site, you need to know that certain practices are very much frowned upon by the search engines. Here are three of the most commonly used methods to trick the spiders into a high ranking, and some of them can get you permanently banned:
Cloaking
Cloaking is the act of delivering customized pages (pages that are different from the page a visitor would see) to spiders in an effort to enhance a page’s rank. When a visitor types in the same URL, a different page is shown. The page a visitor sees would usually rank much lower than the cloaked page if it was crawled by a spider.
Machine-generated gibberish
Gibberish is used to promote keyword-laden pages. Basically, this is computer-generated text hidden in the background of a page (white text on a white background for example) that consists of nothing more than gibberish with keywords throughout. The goal is to trick spiders into thinking the page is packed with relevant information, when in actuality the visitor never even sees that part of the text.
Improper use of links
Using link farms, free-for-all pages and other link gaining methods to generate unnatural or deceptive links in another method used by search engine “spammers”. The goal is to convince spiders that your page is so important that you have thousands of links pointing to it, but in reality many of these links are not relevant at all and are useless to visitors.
It’s very important that you do not try to trick, or “spam”, the search engine crawlers. The risk of consequences does not equal the perceived reward.
Improving your search engine rankings will take time; it is not an overnight process. Many times it can take weeks or months to see any progress. But, if you follow these guidelines, chances are your rankings will significantly improve over time. Search engine optimization is a constantly changing art form. But for now, the most important thing to remember is that your page titles, alt tags, Meta tags and content should all feature keyword-relevant content. If everything on a page corresponds to your selected keywords and you incorporate relevant keyword-laden links (and many links point back to your site), you will have a great chance of improved rankings. Good luck and happy ranking!
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