July's Feature Article: Building a Search-Engine Friendly Web Site
In this issue, we'll explore how to build search engine exposure, and discuss techniques you can use in your next site redesign.
Search Engine Visibility
How can you make sure people find your site? Today, people are more likely than ever to head to Google instead of the yellow pages. Making sure your site is optimized for the keywords people are searching can be a low-cost way of boosting web site traffic, but it does take some planning and ongoing effort to make sure your site attracts attention. In this article, we'll explore some basic best practices that can help your site stand out.
Find Out What Are People Actually Searching For
Before you start optimizing your site with keywords, it's important to make sure they're the right words. Most likely, if your company uses internal jargon, people outside the company aren't going to search for it. Put yourself in your customers' shoes and think about what they're likely to search for.
Online Tools to Help You Find The Right Words
A few good tools for finding terms people are actively searching for are Overture's Keyword Selector Tool, Google's Keyword Selection Tool, and Wordtracker. Researching some of your key words here can help you find relevant phrases people are actively searching.
Keep Your Keyword List Short and Focused
I've worked on many sites where the management team wants to use as many industry-related words as possible, or target multiple search phrases, but are surprised when their traffic does not jump. Keep your list of target keywords to 20 or less, and your target phrases to 5 or so. By optimizing your site for these few key words phrases, you might miss a few visitors, but will capture the most relevant ones.
Real Text is Really Relevant
Search engines can only index what they can see: HTML text within the body of your page and specially-coded tags. If your site's content is buried within an attractive graphic or Flash movie, it's probably invisible to search engines. The easiest way to increase your visibility is to provide some relevant, searchable text on your home page. Don't stop there, however; you'll want to use your target phrases throughout your site, not just your landing page. While coming up as the first result is your main goal, filling slots two through five with individual pages from your site can be just as effective.
Where to Use Your Key Words and Phrases
Search engines give special weight to certain types of text content, specifically page titles, headers, metadata, and hyperlinks. Without getting too technical, here are some more places to put your target search terms:
- Page Titles - Inside the <title> tags of documents (this is what appears in the top bar of the browser window). You should create relevant titles for each and every page!
- Headers - The heads and subheads of your body copy (make sure to use code elements H1, H2, etc.)
- Metadata - These are code tags in the head of the HTML document that aren't visible to users, but are indexed by search engines, including:
- Keywords - This is a list of target words, and you should try to keep it to 20 or less. By separating these with commas, you'll allow search engines to find permutations and combinations of these words. For instance, a list like "sales, training, marketing" can become "sales training," "marketing training," etc.
- Description - Though this paragraph should contain your target phrases, it's important to make it readable, as it's often displayed as the description of your site that appears below your URL or page title in search results. Most indexes will only recognize the first 255 characters, so keep it concise!
- Hyperlinks - Not only do these help people move around your site, but linked words are often treated as being more relevant than the surrounding plain text. Instead of using "click here" for your link text, use your key search words whenever possible.
Make Your Pages Easy for Indexes to Find
Among the many special tactics you can employ to boost your rankings, one of the easiest is to create a sitemap that links to every page of your site, and link to that sitemap page from every page of your site. This helps search engines find your pages in a short amount of time, since they'll probably only index a few levels deep with each visit.
A Thousand Flashlights Create a Spotlight
One of the most effective ways to boost your relevance to search engines is to have other sites point to yours. We'll cover this in depth in a future article, but start by requesting links from your vendors, customers, partners, and the industry associations you belong to. The more links you have pointing to your site, the more relevant the search engines will consider you in results pages, especially when the text links pointing to you contain one of your key phrases.
Continued Next Month...
In next month's installment, we'll explore how modular, template-driven design for your next site can help you ensure a consistent look-and-feel while reducing maintenance and development costs. Are you one of those people that likes to read ahead? Download an abstract here (79K PDF).
Previous newsletters in this series focused on look-and-feel, clear navigation, visual hierarchy, creating easy-to-scan text, and building differentiation. You can read our previous articles here.
About the Author
Dan Wilson is a marketing consultant who has been helping companies reach the next level through their communications efforts for over 13 years. Dan's passion for helping clients achieve their goals has led to many successful campaign launches for Fortune 1000 companies. Dan also served for several years on the program advisory panel for UC Davis Extension, developing course curriculum for and teaching web design and multimedia courses. Dan holds an AA in Art and a BS in Business Marketing, and is the Principal and Founder of Brand, Etc. LLC, a brand development and marketing communications firm based in the Sierra Foothills.
In Previous Issues...
Our previous issues focused on look-and-feel, clear navigation, visual hierarchy, creating easy-to-scan text, and building differentiation. You can find our previous newsletters here.
This article is part of a multi-part series covering 10 Best-Practice Essentials for Your Next Web Site.
Want a sneak peek at all ten best practices? Download an abstract here (79K PDF).
This Month's Quote
"Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can't."
-Morris Hite
Did You Know?
Our recent web site effectiveness study examined over 200 leading regional companies, and found that 53% ranked "fair" or "poor" for search engine visibility!
The Most Common Causes?
- Flash intro on the home page with no other text visible
- All home page text contained within graphics files
- An all-Flash web site with no alternative content
- Failure to use meta tags