Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the attempt to get Google and Yahoo and Microsoft to notice your site and give it a good position (rather than showing up on the 20th page of results).

If you are making "yellow plastic sharks", then you want anyone who enters "yellow plastic sharks" into a web search engine to find your site. Preferably on the first few pages of results.

The various search engines use programs called "spiders" or "crawlers" that read and catalog everything they can find on the web. Getting "found" isn't a problem, the spiders will find any new site in a matter of weeks. The problem is getting to the top of the list. These "spider" programs use secret algorithms that decide how important your site is and how much information about "yellow plastic sharks" your site has. If the "spider" decides that your site is important and has good "yellow plastic shark" info, then you will get a good search position and your potential clients will have an easy time finding you.

Search engine optimization is a large business. There are lots of companies that will take your money and do nothing but suggest modifications to your existing site in order to improve search rankings. Much of it is snake oil silliness. The search engines will not publish how the spiders decide to rank a site. If they did, everyone would "game the system". It is as secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola or Colonel Sander's formula of 11 herbs and spices. But, most agree that modern spiders are looking for (in approximate order of importance):

  1) Text content with keywords (non-image and non-flash)
  2) Incoming links from real (not link farm) sites
  3) Traffic
  4) Good descriptive page titles and file names
  5) Age of site
  6) Robot text file and site map
  7) Alt tag descriptions on photographs
  8) Date page was last updated
  9) Meta tags
10) Lack of broken links
11) W3C compliant code

Lots of folks would argue about the exact order we've used in the above list. Remember that we are all guessing at a secret. However, by optimizing the above features on your website, you can get far better search engine placement. Lets look at each item in more depth.

1) Text content with keywords (non-image and non-flash): The words you are currently reading (and almost all of the words on this page) are "nonimage text", also called "HTML text". Spiders can read and rate this text. Nonimage text is the most important factor in how the spiders rank your site! Using our "yellow plastic shark" site example, the spiders will look at a site and consider "keywords" in your text. Keywords are anything your customers might type into a search engine while looking for your company. You want your "nonimage text" to contain these keywords a number of times. So, you would want to make sure that "yellow plastic shark" was repeatedly used in your text. You might also want to make sure that words such as "toy" and "fish" were repeatedly used. Keywords should not be taken to extremes. If your keyword use is above 6% of the total text, it will be hard for regular folks to read. It will seem grammatically incorrect.

Where you use keywords is also important to the spiders. Words on your home page tend to be more important than words on interior pages. Words using "header tags" (larger bold text, see the top third of this page) are considered more important than the "paragraph text" you are currently reading. Words at the top of a page have slightly more importance than words at the bottom of a page.

The quantity of words is also important to the spiders. If you have 2 sentences of text on your "yellow plastic shark" homepage and your competitor has 4 paragraphs of text, well the "yellow plastic shark" market is quite competitive and your competitor will probably be higher in the search engine ranking than you.

The way "nonimage text" works is that the program on the site's host sends out the coding for the letters and "requests" a font from the viewer's computer. If the site is well programmed, it will actually request a family of fonts, just in case the viewer's computer doesn't have the font requested. This text you are reading is asking the viewer's computer to use the viewer's copy of Arial, if that isn't available on the viewer's computer then it asks for Helvetica, if that isn't available on the viewer's computer then it asks for the viewer's default san-serif font.

What this means to the client and the web designer is that we have to give up some control. Becuase we are using the viewer's fonts, we can not control the layout of the text in the exacting way expected in printed media. On our main test computer this line breaks (goes to the next line) at the word "sentence" (the one in bold) in this sentence. Chances are high that on the computer you are using, with that computer's fonts, the break is in a different place.

When you need exact control of font type and placement, you may want to use image text. The header (letterhead) at the top of this page is image text. We used image text there for two reasons. We wanted our "official letterhead font" which is Corsiva. We could have programmed the page to ask for Corsiva from the viewer's computer, but many computers would not have that font. Secondly, the header text has a shadow effect that could not be done in nonimage text. Unfortunately, image text is unreadable by search engine spiders. That header is just a blank space to search engine spiders.

Flash is similar to image text. It give you a lot more control over layout and font styles (and can add a lot of "fun" to a site). Unfortunately, Flash is virtually unreadable to the spiders. Both Flash and image text should be used in moderation for best search engine placement.

2) Incoming links from real (not link farm) sites: Along with the spider reading what it can on your site, it considers how many other sites refer back to your site. If you can get other sites to link back to your site, this helps significantly with your search engine ranking. If the sites linking back to your site are in related industries and/or have high rankings themselves, it helps even more. If our "yellow plastic shark" site could get toy stores or toy distributors to include a link to their site it would be a big help.

You should beware of using "link farms". These are sites that (usually) charge you a small fee to put your link on their page. These pages are nothing but a long list of links. The search engine spiders know what these sites are. At best, you've wasted your money on the link farm. At worst, many believe the the spiders rank you lower for using this practice.

3) Traffic: Traffic is simply the amount of people viewing your site. Yes, this is a frustrating one! It is hard to get traffic without a good search engine ranking, and they won't give you that ranking until you have traffic. This is one of the important reasons that you need a marketing plan beyond the web. Particularly important to "startup" companies, you need to "drive" people to your website. This can be done with print advertising, newspaper ads, word of mouth and many other forms of non web advertising.

4) Good descriptive page titles and file names: Page names appear at the very top of a web browser window. For this page you will see "Search Engine Optimization - Ferguson Photography and Design Simi Valley, CA" which describes what the page is about, who we are and where we are. Because search engine spiders can read this, it does help in search engine rankings. File names are less obvious to the viewer, but are read by the spiders. Everything from the page's technical file name (seo.php for this page) to the technical file name of images on the page (search.jpg on this page) can be read by the spiders.

5) Age of site: There is frustratingly little a site owner or designer can do about this one. The search engine spiders do know when they first found a site and they consider an older site more important than a newer site. Luckily it isn't the most important criteria, but it is part of the equation.

6) Robot text file and site map: These are invisible files that tell the spiders the "architecture" of your site and what parts of the site you do (or do not) want the spiders to look at. Because they make the spiders job "a little bit" easier, they also get you "a little bit" better rating. Perhaps more importantly, they allow you to put parts of your site off limits to the spiders. If you have pages that are only intended for your existing customers, or are in any way private, these can be excluded from the search engines.

7) Alt tag descriptions on photographs: These are special tags (coding) intended to help the vision impaired to use the web. Along with being important to the vision impaired, they are required for a page to be W3C compliant (see #11 below) and they are read by the spiders. That gives us one more place to put important keywords and help our search engine ranking. Alt tags are far less important than regular text (see #1 above).

A note for the truly "geeky": Alt tags are usually invisible, but some browsers will display them if you leave your curser over an image for about 5 seconds. Depending on how your preferences are set, most Internet Explorer browsers will show the alt tag ""search compass" if you leave your curser over the picture near the top left of this page. Most FireFox browsers will not. Internet Explorer is rather unpredictable in this regard. It may refuse to display the tag if your curser has already been over the image, so don't worry if it doesn't work for you.

8) Date page was last updated: Just as spiders know the age of your site (see #4 above) they know the last time each of your pages has been significantly change. The difference between this and #4 is that the spiders give you a better ranking if you significantly update your pages on a regular basis. A page that gets new material every few months is considered more important than a page that gets new material every year and both of those are considered more important than a page that has been left unchanged for many years. Because the spiders typically consider your home page more important than interior pages, regularly changing the info (words and pictures) on your home page helps with your ranking.

9) Meta tags: These are invisible bits of computer code inside your site. Originally they were intended to allow the website designer to talk directly to the spiders and explain what was on the site. Great idea! Unfortunately they were so misused that the spiders now all but ignore them. About 15 years ago it was common practice for web designers to put a words such as "Pamela Anderson" or "Sexy Girls" into the meta tags a dozen times. That drove lots of "hits" to the website and the designer could say to the client "look how popular the new site I did for you is". Of course, the people going to the site were not interested in "yellow plastic sharks", so all the "hits" were a waste of bandwidth.

Some search engines still use the meta description tag as the "text" shown in a search result. That tag is still important, but only because viewers who find your site in the search engine may see that text. No current spiders consider the content of meta tags an important deciding factor in how you get ranked.

10) Lack of broken links: Even if you give the spiders robot files (see #6 above), the spider will still try and follow every internal and external link on every page it has permission to catalog. If the spider find nonworking links you will get a slightly lower ranking. Broken links can be within your site, or to external sites. Our "yellow plastic shark" site might include a link to "Joe's Toys", a store that sells our sharks. If Joe goes out of business, or changes his website address, it is important to fix or remove that broken link on our site.

11) W3C compliant code: The W3C is the international standards organization for the entire WWW and is made up of members from most big web companies (Microsoft, Apple, Mazola/FireFox, AOL, Cisco, Sun and about 430 others). Perhaps the W3C's most important function is setting standards on how the actual computer code that creates a web site should be written. The "closer" a page stays to using W3C compliant code, the better the spiders will rank your site.

Notice that we used the word "closer" in the previous sentence, it is often a bad idea to insist on being 100% compliant with W3C standards. If you've read the browser discussion on our statistics page, you may remember the mention that the Microsoft's popular Internet Explorer browser has "a frightening number of idiosyncrasies". Even though Microsoft is a member of W3C, they sometimes ignore the rules! That means that we sometimes have to bend or break the rules too. To be fair, all browsers ignore some of the W3C guidelines, Internet Explorer just ignores the most.

A note for the truly "geeky": Take a look at the phone number, city and email link near the bottom of this page. Looks quite "straight forward", just 5 lines of text. In order to get a web site to display those 5 lines in a W3C compliant fashion, the web designer needs to create the coding shown in the box below. If you are familiar with coding you may also notice a request for a font family on the viewer's computer (see #1 above) and an alt tag (see #7 above).