BillWixted’s Blog

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term used to describe a collection of techniques that can improve a web site’s position in search results generated by search engines like Google’s. The goal of SEO is improving your presence on the web and enhancing your Internet footprint. If you are a web site developer or you have any interest in becoming one this will be an area of vital concern to you.

To understand search engines and how to get the best results from them, it’s best to start with an analysis of the paper written by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 2000 at Standford.   “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine” has many critical points that are worth considering that I’ve listed below.  I’ve inserted my own comments in italics that translate their assertions into practical advice.

1. “In particular, link structure and link text both provide a lot of information for making relevance judgments and quality filtering. Google makes use of both link structure and anchor text.”  Translation: ensure that your hyperlinks contain descriptive anchor text.  For example, instead of click here, say click on Bill Wixted’s blog.  Also, within your site provide textual links to and from all pages on every page if possible, and include links back to your home page as well.”
2. “Intuitively, pages that are well cited from many places around the web are worth looking at. Also, pages that have perhaps only one citation from something like Yahoo! homepage are also generally worth looking at.”  Translation: Try to ensure that many sites link to your site, but keep in mind that the quality of those sites matter.  Avoid the use of link farms because Google generally frowns up this sort of attempt to manipulate their results.”
3. “Words in a larger or bolder font are weighted higher than other words.”  Translation: Put the phrases you want people to type into Google to find you with in the largest and boldest font on your site.
4. “…companies deliberately manipulating search engines for profit becomes a serious problem.”  Translation: Don’t try to pull the wool over Google’s eyes.  The Google collective brain is much bigger than that of the individual webmaster.                               `

Search engines like Google hate it when you try to fool them into giving your pages a higher ranking than they deserve. Consequently, if you don’t want to be blacklisted, you should avoid keyword stuffing, spamdexing, article spinning, and link farms. Avoid hidden text in links, don’t link to unseemly sites or spammers and don’t present different information to search engines than what your user’s see.

Following are some simple guidelines that will improve the performance of your site in terms of search results:

• Focus on making your content accessible to users. If you succeed in that, the search engines should have no problem properly indexing your site.
• Figure out what key phrases you would like people to use to get to your site. Repeat these phrases as much as you reasonably can in the first 200 characters of any page.
• Favor static over dynamic pages.
• Make sure you are using the HTML <title> tag to succinctly and accurate describe each web page’s main purpose.  Google likes the <title> tag and pays particular attention to it.
• Implement a Sitemap.
• Submit your site to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Make sure your robots.txt file is properly configured on your web server. Verify it using Google’s robots.txt analysis tool.
• Use a text browser like Lynx to verify your site. This will give you an idea about how crawlers see your site.
• Your site should have a clear directory structure. Make sure to use text hyperlinks.
• Avoid overly complex directory structures on your site. Pages that are very distant from the root directory may be ignored by some crawlers.
• Aim for 100 or fewer links on a page.
• For images, use the ALT tag to describe the image.
• Make sure you don’t have broken or stale links on your site.
• Verify your HTML. Test your site in multiple browsers.
• Try to increase the number of high-quality websites that link to your site.