Design & Marketing Blog

Nearly half way through the run down, we get to arguably the most important part of the search engine optimization process.  The optimization of your website’s content.

Content is the most effective element in which  SEO’s have to work with. Content is often times described  as ‘All Things On-Page’, and includes titles, tags, text, in-site links and out-bound links.

In the search engine optimization process, content optimization describes most of the hands-on work completed to create unique pages in a website  place well in search engines.

Occasionaly, optimization of an existing website simply requires the SEO to perform minor tweaks. Sometimes, optimal content doesn’t exist and has to be written by the SEO. Frequently, SEOs come across pre-existing page content that needs to be totally rewritten or redeveloped.

The biggest downfall of most site owners and SEO’s, is trouble finding the balance. Often times, too much emphasis is put into the optimization process, to try and make the content most relevant for search engines.  Unfortunately, this content doesn’t always seem to be the most relevant or best written content for the end user… your customer/prospect.

The first step you want to take, is to ensure you’re writing ’simple’ rules and outlines for the search engine’s robots. These robots are what control how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked.  You’re best to keep it simple.

Limiting to one topic per page allows you to truly focus on optimization the content around that specific topic, while providing relevant content for the end user.

As for ‘titles’. Each of your website’s pages should have clear and descriptive titles. This element is what search engines, and most human visitors see first.

Look at the very top of your screen. Notice the words beside the Firefox or Internet Explorer symbol? That’s the title of this page.  Your title should be carefully written and no longer than 50 characters.

After the title, comes ‘meta-tags’… Although these don’t have the impact they used to have in search engines, they are still very much important to the overal optimization process of your website.

The most important is by far the ‘meta-description’ tag. Search engines use the meta description to help confirm the topical intent of the specific page. They also use them for a much more practical purpose. The description is often used to phrase the short paragraphs found under the Title in search engine results. When a search engine users is making a decision which link to click, a well written meta description might make the difference. Don’t ignore this tag, each page should have a unique one.

Now, it comes to visibile elements such as images, text, links etc. When starting a new search engine optimization project, SEOs usually analyze what they have to work with. The best SEOs often think like doctors when reviewing a website with the understanding that they could do a lot more harm if they are not extremely careful. More often than not, changes made to titles and meta descriptions are beneficial to clients.  Frequently overlooked or under-utilized, augmenting the titles and descriptions of pages usually helps a site achieve better rankings. Changes to the text that appears on a page, on the other hand, might unleash a host of unintended consequences. Aside from the chance a SEO might mistakenly change the message the client is trying to convey, messing around with body-text might also damage current search engine rankings.

The first task in content optimization is analysis. Having a full understanding of where a clients’ web pages rank, under which keyword phrases and the degree of success current placements enjoy is critically important for making decisions about what to work on. Analysis requires data and data requires information.

Almost any page in a URL has a good chance to achieve strong search engine placement under a limited number of keyword phrase. In deciding which phrases to apply to which pages, dividing items on the keyword selection list into categories ranging from general to specific proves to be a solid system.

At first mention, content optimization might be thought to be about writing primarily for search engine spiders. It’s not. Well optimized website content should be created for live-human visitors and deployed in a way that that draws the reader towards a decision. Anyone can talk to a bot. Compelling website visitors to commit to an action and achieve a conversion is a bit more difficult.

As noted earlier, a good working rule is to stick to one topic per page and to consider the overall website as a document tree. The top of the tree is the INDEX page. Below the INDEX are the second or upper-level pages that tend to describe the company, its mission, goals, general services, and contact information. Pages found on subsequent levels of the website tend to feature more specific information the deeper a document is found on the tree.

Writing for a web-based readers and search engine spiders is much like writing for newspaper readers. Because the web is a dynamic environment, readers have notoriously short attention spans. Important points and keyword phrases need to be mentioned early in the copy and, by the end of the third short paragraph; the reader should know what they are supposed to do next. Subsequent paragraphs are used to support the story told by the first three. The goal is to hold their interest long enough to confidently direct them to the next step.

The final thing is linking. Internal linking is huge. Providing both search engines, as well as your visitors with an easy to use navigation and sub-linking system will keep everyone happy.  Having links simply bounce around to various pages on your website, with no specific purpose will not only confuse your visitors, but also hurt your rankings. Use links on pages to point to other relevant pages within your website. This will help increase your ‘page-view’ rate among website visitors.

Upon completion of the keyword selection and competitor analysis, you’re ready to do some ‘on-site’ work to the structure of your website.

Of the three factors of SEO (Structure, Content, and Linking), I believe the structure of a website to be one of the most often overlooked elements in web development, even among search engine optimization companies. The structure of a website consists of several key elements . These include the code behind your website, how your website pages link to each other, and the technologies used in your website.

We’ll get right into developing a proper structure for your website, from the ground up.

Website Templating

I feel I must stress my extreme hatred towards Dreamweaver templates. As a SEO / Web Developer, I strongly urge you to stay away from them.  If you’re going to template a site, use Server Side Includes, PHP Includes, or ASP includes. Here’s why Dreamweaver templates are the devil.

• Embedded comments in your code can drastically throw off your keyword density measurements.
• If you need a non standard footer in an index file you will need to break it from the template, creating issues for future template updates.
• If you have a disagreement with your web developer / designer and you part company if he doesn’t supply you with the template it’ll cost you.

When developing websites, I prefer to use PHP for implementing Server Side Includes. PHP is a relative easy language to learn for implementing simple things like includes.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

As an SEO enthusiast, one thing that I can’t stress enough is try to stay away from Dynamic URLs. These are URL addresses with variables, and values following the “?” character. Google used to state that it had troubles indexing sites with dynamic URLs, and to a degree this still holds true. If you are going to use Dynamic URLs always try to have less than 2 variables in your URL.

A better approach is to URL Rewrite your URLs. For the Linux side, Apache has Mod Rewrite, and for Windows you can use ISAPI Rewrite. When you implement a URL Rewriting system you are essentially creating a hash URL lookup table for your site, than when a server query comes in it checks the hash table to see if it finds a match then feeds it the corresponding entry.

To put it into simple terms what we strive to accomplish with URL Rewrites is to mask our dynamic content by having it appear as a static URL. A URL like Article?Id=52&Page=5 could be rewritten to /Article/ID/52/Page/5/, which to a search engine appears to be a directory with an index.htm (or whatever default / index page your particular web server uses).

Dynamic Websites and Duplicate Content

If there is one reoccurring problem I see in a lot of dynamic websites on the internet is that they can sometimes present the same content on multiple pages. An example of this is when you visit a website that allows you to “view a printer friendly version of this page”, a better web solution implementation would be to develop a printer friendly Cascading Stylesheet.

Another goal is also to avoid having any additional URLs on you site such as Links for changing currency with a redirect script, links to “Email to a friend” pages, or anything related to this. Always use Forms to POST date like this so that the same page, or a static page to reduce page count. This issue seems to plague a lot of custom developed ecommerce / CMSes. I’ve actually see CMSes that will present up to 5 URL / Links for each page, in the long run the spiders got so confused in indexing the catalog that some of the main content pages were not cached.

Internal Site Navigation

If built properly, most websites will never have a need for an XML Sitemap, other than to get their new pages indexed that much quicker (Ecommerce & Enterprise being exceptions). I will however recommend that every website have a user accessible Sitemap linked from every page to aide your users, and for internal linking.

Most sites with indexing problems have issues with their internal page linking structure. The biggest of all these issues are websites that implement pure javascript navigation based system, these systems depend on Javascript to insert HTML into pages as there rendered. Now Google can parse javascript menus to find URLs, however all of these pages will only be linked from the JS, and not the pages there located on (expect no internal pagerank passing). The best Javascript menus are menus that manipulate your code on your page to change which sections are being displayed via CSS. Keep I mind the more internal links you have to a page, the more internal strength this page will be given. So when in doubt link it up.

As nerdy as most of the above probably sounds, your web developer should understand it… If they don’t, better yet if they’re not practicing these methods, fire them! They’re only hurting your search engine optimization efforts.

As usual, we strongly encourage you to call us at Primary Target. Don’t worry, we can stay away from the above ‘techy jargon’, and lay it down in english.

We’re creative web developers and markters first… nerds second.