Practical Search Engine Optimization

June 25, 2003 | 7 Comments

I’ve been spending some time of late learning how to optimize my sites for search engine results and frankly I’ve found many of the resources out there either too in depth and arcane or just plain silly. Or worse even, many recommendations, like increasing the number of words on your home page just to please a search engine, can have an adverse effect on usability and some may actually decrease your relevancy.

I’ve addressed these concerns in my second Gorilla Web Tips article - Practical Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I’m by no means an expert on SEO, but I think you’ll find some rather simple, effective ways to optimize your sites for search without hurting your users’ experience.

Filed under: Web General

Comments

1. Gabe da Silveira said:

Good article. I have read that fewer and fewer search engines actually use keywords these days, but they can be a valuable tool even if they don’t go beyond your own search engine (I weight keywords heavily in my ht:dig installation).

Personally I don’t believe in SEO. Maybe it’s because I don’t view search engines as a traffic driving force. A site should stand on its own and drive traffic through word-of-mouth, direct links, and targeted advertising (if necessary). Not that they aren’t important, but I say do what’s necessary to make your site/content appear properly in search engines then forget about it.

Posted on June 25, 2003 12:02 PM | #

2. Simon Willison said:

Your information about page titles and intelligent use of headers is bang on the mark, but I’m not so sure about the keywords advice. The only major search engine that doesn’t ignore meta keywords completely is Inktomi, and even they put very little importance on them: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2165061

I’ve never paid a huge amount of attention to search engine optimisation (other than ensuring my page titles are sensible) but I’ve been getting a huge amount of traffic from Google to my weblog recently for a number of interesting search terms, as has my girlfriend who has a site built using similar techniques to mine. The benefits of a frequently updated site (or blog) to search engine visibility have been discussed at length before, but it seems that Google in particular seriously rewards structural markup with CSS for layout. I imagine it’s because it dramatically increases keyword density by eliminating a huge amount of irrelevant HTML.

These days Google is the most important search engine by far, and getting to the top of Google requires frequently updated content that attracts a lot of links from other sites. Weblogs are ideal for this, but working out how to harness a weblog for a client site (where it may not be updated often) to help with search engine listings is still pretty tricky.

Posted on June 25, 2003 12:28 PM | #

3. Keith said:

Thanks for the comments, they’re really helpful. Simon - thanks for clairifying that bit about the keywords. My understanding was that they were used by some search engines but I wasn’t too clear on that. I imagine using them wouldn’t hurt, unless maybe you tried to “spam” with them.

In any case I’m going to make a small addition to the article to clear that up for those reading it. Thanks again.

Posted on June 25, 2003 01:15 PM | #

4. Eric Scheid said:

I would add that sometimes writing the text with an eye to search engines can in fact help out the user too. The specific I have in mind is expanding or explaining acronyms/abbreviations, and including a footnote or two to introduce alternative terms, or to make mention of other items of either broader or narrower scope. Write it as human readable prose, not just a mash of keywords, and the users will think you’re just being thorough and helpful… and meanwhile search engines will lead extra hits to the page.

Posted on June 27, 2003 12:41 PM | #

5. Mike said:

Another useful article on this subject is by Brett Tabke at http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm
It is worth a read.

Posted on June 27, 2003 05:22 PM | #

6. Findability Consultant said:

A good, straightforward introduction to search engine optimization. Well done and keep up the informative writing!

Posted on September 30, 2003 10:47 AM | #

7. Nicholas Tolson said:

Simon is right on with the keyword meta tag. Only Inktomi is on board with that still. A possible valuable use for this meta tag, though, is if you use an internal search engine on your site. Many of these still index and search using these tags, so it’s hard to say that they are completely useless. They certainly are no longer very important for WWW search engine placement, however, and this is something the general public (or those that are getting suckered by nefarious SEO firms) need to be educated on.

To expand on what Eric said, I don’t see how you can not pay attention to SEO, if you’re building a site with your user in mind. It basically comes with building a site using proper coding standards (using CSS makes your content-to-code ratio better, thus making your site easier for search engines to “read”, for one) and writing useful valuable content (which presumably would be filled with keywords anyway). In my eyes, SEO is inseparable from building a good site for your audience - or, if you do the latter the former happens automatically.

I can’t stress enough the importance of the title tag - for both SEO and your users (think about it, it’s also what shows up in their bookmarks and as the title for links in most search engine results). Thank you for carrying this torch as well.

I think keywords in links aren’t paid attention to enough, so I was glad to see mention of this as well. I’m surprised you didn’t go more into the importance of links (both on your site and to your site), but a great read nonetheless.

I’ve just written a slightly more in-depth article with the exact same title (and similar ideas) for my company. I’ll include a link below for anyone who’d like to read it: Practical Search Engine Optimzation

Posted on July 13, 2004 09:27 AM | #