Search Engine Optimization, The Best Way
August 23, 2004 | 
20 Comments
Summary: In my experience, the best search engine optimization is done by providing quality content.
There are many ways to optimize your site for search engines, some work better than others. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something I’ve had to learn via trial and error, I’ve tried many tricks and techniques over the years and I’ve found that many don’t make much of a difference. Leastways not for little old me—the independent publisher.
Looking back I never really understood why they would have. I mean, most of them were simply tricks to fool Google into giving me more priority than I deserved. Probably should have caught a clue back then, but I guess you live and learn.
Anyway, because of all this, I’ve got a pretty good handle on good ways to insure Google, and the rest of the search engines, like your site.
I do really well here and I’ve done quite a bit to make it that way. SEO is work, man, hard work. Still, I feel there is one way, above all, that will ensure most people of getting the search hits you deserve and at the same time provide Google, and Web searchers, with relevant pathways to information they’re looking for.
Kind of like using SEO as a public service! Right? Ok, maybe not…
Provide quality content!
Now, I realize, that the real way you get a high ranking is by getting people to link to you, right? Well, if you have quality content, you’ll be more likely to get those links honestly. And let’s face it, most of us don’t have access to all the SEO trickery the big placement companies have.
It could be argued, for many sites out there, that if you don’t have quality content, you don’t deserve a high ranking in search engines. Kinda makes sense, doesn’t it? All the tricks, link exchanges, comment spam in the world, while they may help, won’t be as beneficial to your site, as a whole, as simply putting time and effort into your content.
If anything that stuff just makes it harder to find things by confusing the search engines. Don’t be part of the problem—be part of the solution!
We still can’t find anything
We’re still in a bit of a messy state when it comes to finding things via search on the Web. It seems like there is more emphasis in SEO on taking advantage of Google’s weaknesses than exploiting it’s strengths. SEO is lots of expensive trickery and mathematics and secret recipes, yet we still can’t seem to get really relevant results when we search.
It’s all about the content
If you take the time to write relevant content, and update with some frequency, you will have a better chance of people finding you than all the other tricks you could try combined. Search engines are smart, they know what people want to find and they’re getting better at it every day — this is a good thing!
Some easy tips on leveraging content for search engines:
- Use simple, relevant titles. This is key. If you don’t know already, you should read this.
- Update often. Keep adding content. Search engines like sites that have been recently and frequently updated.
- Keep it (mostly) relevant. Depending on the site, this can vary in importance, but I’ve found than for many sites, sticking to one topic works best.
- Get people to link to you. The best way to do this is to provide content people find valuable, not trying to wheel and deal for links.
That’s about it. Quality content is the best way to make your site attractive to search engines. Pretty simple.
Filed under: Web General
Comments
1. Kyle said:
Very well said. The linking thing is obviously what gets you the highest ranking, but content leads to that doesn’t it?? Again, you’re on the money here. Common sense really, but it’s amazing how overcomplicated people make SEO sometimes.
Posted on August 23, 2004 11:41 AM | #
2. Scrivs said:
Here is my tip:
Go on to a famous person’s site and write a comment that everyone will read. Look at the content of the entry and look through your archives to see if you have written something similar. Try your best to fit that entry in the comment so that the search engines pick it up and show you more love.
For example, I wrote Search Engine Optimization on one of my tiny sites that nobody pays attention to. So what I just did is posted a link on Keith’s site that is highly read and now I am guaranteed to get a million hits because Keith site is crazy popular.
Finally, pray to god that everyone knows that you are an ass and takes these comments in stride.
Posted on August 23, 2004 11:51 AM | #
3. Keith said:
Scrivs – Should I consider that comment spam? ;) No, really, it’s a good article and worth mentioning. I need to pay more attention to your new site. Anyway, you prove my point.
Content, baby, content.
Posted on August 23, 2004 12:12 PM | #
4. Scrivs said:
Spam? What is that? That was a genuine comment with great content to enhance the great contentness of this contented entry you have written. Worse comes to worse I should’ve helped your Adsense ads become a little more relevant.
Posted on August 23, 2004 12:27 PM | #
5. Scrivs said:
Sorry, I forgot to chime in on my thoughts for your entry. Of course you are right in all the aspects you talked about, but really the most important thing for sites that are starting off is incoming links. Without these the search engines will not put high importance on your site.
Since Keith is fortunate to have a large number of incoming links his most important aspect of SEO becomes page titles and headers. The search engines will already pick up his entries, but with good use of titles and headers and high keyword density, his entries will rank higher. Even more so when others link to the specific entries.
Posted on August 23, 2004 12:43 PM | #
6. Keith said:
Scrivs – All true, BUT…A good way to get those incoming links is to creat quality content. It’s a win-win situation. For example, I’ve never once asked for someone to link to me. I put my head down and wrote and luckily (and luck does play a part as well) people noticed.
It begins with content…no matter if you are looking for incoming links or a way to up that rank.
Oh and of course I was kidding about the spam… ;)
Posted on August 23, 2004 12:51 PM | #
7. Adrian said:
Right on the money…
I think way too many people miss that they need good quality content. I have a perfect example in one of the posts on my blog where I posted code to a javascript base64 encoder/decoder. If you search for javascript and base64 (or some other variation on that) on google, my site usually hits within the top ten or twenty (depending on the day), which is not bad considering almost nobody links to my site (literally), so content does matter a lot.
The fact that google crawled my site during a failed mod_rewrite experiment is secondary (it’ll get fixed the next time they crawl) to the fact that it was good content and relevent to that without much other fluff, which still placed it pretty high in a result set of over 52,000 matches.
Posted on August 23, 2004 01:50 PM | #
8. sherzy said:
Great tips. Thanks for the article.
Posted on August 23, 2004 04:41 PM | #
9. Yannick L. said:
This is a good article. I was talking with a client of mine who’s website was down for some time and he noticed that his site had lost its placing on search engines. Now with the help of this article hopefully it will be back up there once I’m done with the redesign and with some time. Great tips Keith. Thanks.
Posted on August 23, 2004 08:26 PM | #
10. Small Paul said:
Hey Scriv, I think the importance of incoming links’ diminishes for more specific, less common (in terms of appearence on pages) search terms. Do a Google search for ‘Athens 2004 hyperlink policy’. Currently, 3rd result (it was first near the end of last week) is a little page I put up.
As far as I can tell, this page has no incoming links whatsoever, except for the 2 links from my homepage. I’m not sure if my homepage has a higher pagerank (thus making its links to the Athens page more important) due to my commenting at various blogs, but I reckon the page is high in Google cos a) it’s a reasonably specific and rare search term, and b) the search term occurs in the title and the filename. I’ve got a feeling filenames are considered pretty important by Google.
The only thing I’d add to Keith’s article (which is already there I think, just not explicitly) would be that content is worth it on its own. Focusing on search engine placement on its own is, obviously, pointless. Websites are only ever a means to an end, so if your site aims to sell things, and only 1 out of a million Google-referred users ever buys anything, your Google rank has got you one sale and bandwidth costs for 999,999 users.
Posted on August 24, 2004 01:30 AM | #
11. Scrivs said:
Hey small paul, that really isn’t a good example simply because how many sites have the term “athens 2004 hyperlink policy” on their sites? From my search I only got about 579 sites so I think that your high ranking has more to do with freshness of the page than anything. If you are still up there in a couple of weeks then it will probably be because of your PR.
However, do a competitive term like “web design” and I guarantee you don’t even touch the top 100.
Do a search on the term “search engine optimization” and you will find that the number #1 site has over 5,000 different pages linking to it with the term “search engine optimization”. Links matter in the long term and in the short term (with PR).
Also it is worthless to try and get high rankings if you are just doing a content site, but if you are strictly a ecommerce site, high rankings can mean the difference between profit and loss.
Posted on August 24, 2004 02:44 AM | #
12. Lachlan Hunt said:
The trick to good comment spam to make it sound quite relevant to the content of the article being commented on. If done well, it’s indistinquishable from legitimate comments, can add valuable points to a discussion and also to increase your pagerank by about 0.0000001%. But then, if it does all that, then it’s not really comment spam anyway.
So, IMO, comment spam is pretty useless in the scheme of things, but posting good quality comments on others sites does serve to get you noticed by other commentors. If it’s a well written and relevant comment, other readers are more likely to visit your page because of it, and if they like what they see there, they may even link from their site to yours.
My point is that commenting on other’s blogs is an important first step for any new bloggers — It helps them get noticed. For instance, I was commenting on Dave Shea’s site recently, and because of it, he linked to a CSS example of mine from his dailies. Obviosly, he thought it was good enough for others to be interested in, and all because I took part in the comment discussion.
Ofcourse, the other point that is touching on, is that if your content is good, you’re more likely to have other’s link to that good content from their sites. So, basically, I completely agree with this article.
Posted on August 24, 2004 08:34 AM | #
13. Derek Featherstone said:
I’ve been a big believer in an “above board” approach to SEO for quite some time. It is a double-edged sword though. Good quality content with meaningful headings, titles and link phrases help people want to link to you, thus making for good PageRank and good visibility in the blogosphere. At the same time, it can drive traffic to your site that doesn’t necessarily belong on your site.
We had been contacted by a person looking for a rebate on their computer that they purchased. We don’t sell computers. The person had done a search on the error message they were presented with and ended up on one of my sites (see The Case of the Missing Defensive Design for the details).
I’m glad we get all kinds of traffic to the site, and I’m glad it appears to be helpful (at least based on incoming links). I’m just wary that we are attracting the wrong kind of traffic, and that the page attracting attention isn’t helpful to those that are searching in the first place.
(FWIW, I wrote a followup to that post as well with some thoughts on keeping traffic away from the site: These aren’t the Pages You are Looking For. Yes, maybe search engines are too good.)
Posted on August 24, 2004 11:16 AM | #
14. Roger said:
I’ve also found that good content plus well-structured documents really do wonders for search engine rankings, and pretty fast. As an example, a couple of months ago I wrote an article in Swedish on the business benefits of using web standards. Just days after publishing the article, it was in the top five results returned by a Google search for “webbstandarder” (Swedish for “web standards”). It is now the #1 result. Sure, searching for that doesn’t return millions of hits, but still…
Interesting note about file names. Google does highlight search terms if they are in the file name of search results.
BTW, Keith, didn’t you move this site to another host recently? You’ve still got that warning about the system being very slow on the comment preview page, and I didn’t notice any slowness ;-)
Posted on August 24, 2004 11:30 AM | #
15. Lars said:
You´re right, content is king - especially for Google with its Page Rank. But your site´s markup must be as lean and well structured as possible to give the boost in rankings. Content hidden in 756 nested tables with 8523 font-tags doesn´t bring you one step closer to the top.
Posted on August 24, 2004 01:57 PM | #
16. BradFitz said:
Seems to always come back to the same thing doesn’t it? Content is King. If everyone spent their energy creating good quality *original* content not only would they get better rankings for themselves, I believe the web would be a better place. But it *is* a lot of work and we do live in a society of instant gratification.
Here’s a very nice article from Developer Shed I feel covers the bases.
Posted on August 24, 2004 05:13 PM | #
17. David said:
Content is prince - quality content is queen and LOTS of quality content is KING. Add one new quality page every day (300-500 words) with good old SEO techniques - keywords once in the header, title, desription tag, keywords tag, h1 & h2. Once on top of the page, once in the bottom, once in bold, once in a comment. Put it in some alt attributes & titles as well. Add external and internal links containing the keyword on every page. Aim for a density between 5% to 20%. Dont know what keywords to use? Try the overture search suggestion tool.
Content is good yes, but the fine old SE techniques works great as a complement.
Posted on August 28, 2004 09:47 AM | #
18. Frosti Sigurjonsson said:
Very interesting discussion
Can you perhaps give me some advice. What if the website content is entirely dynamic, in this case search results? My site aggregates the timetables of European low cost airlines and provides a planning tool. We have actually gone to great lengths to make the site minimalistic. The value for the user lies in the search results and the spider never runs a search.
I guess the only way we can get ranking then is by being linked to ?
Frosti
Posted on March 7, 2005 05:19 PM | #
19. Luke Breuer said:
Honestly, I believe that search engines will never be smart enough to always give intelligent results when they have to search through so much data, unless web designers start putting semantics into their websites. (Look up Semantic Web.)
I believe the current solution is to either use Social Bookmarking or or semantics-based bookmarking. The idea with social bookmarking is that if you and enough other people add enough bookmarks, mathematical calculations can be done to give you more bookmarks you will like.
While this could work well, I believe that the best solution, if enough data is entered, is to have users enter in semantics, or metadata, for bookmarks. This is what I have done with WebMark, an online collaborative bookmark database. I hope to get enough data to perform statistical analysis on tags (a.k.a. keywords) and return really useful results. Check it out!
http://labreuer.caltech.edu/webmark/
Posted on April 27, 2005 04:06 AM | #
20. Jitendra said:
Content is still king beside all other SEO factor. So, add one new quality content page with keyword rich text twist a week (around more then 300 words).
Use keyword in
Title tag ( 5 or 12 words with your main keywords)
Description tag (30 words with frequently use keywords and redable manners for seach engine and visiters)
Keywords tag (not more then 30 keyword Not repeat a specific search word than 4 times, 2 or 3 is better, better in different phrase)
Header tag (H1 to H6 but remember that use limited 20 words in it. Once top of the page once 1/3 of your page and last one use in your bottom of page)
Body text (Use every word don’t more then 3 times every 100 words don’t spam your keywords it will be first readable for visiter)
Jitendra
http://www.tatvasoft.com
Posted on August 26, 2005 04:41 AM | #
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