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Home EMarketingSearch engine marketingSEO Guide

Search engine optimization (SEO) guide

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about improving your web page(s) so that they rank as high as possible in the search engine results page (SERP) seen by a user making a query. Search engine optimization affects only the ‘free’ or organic search results (on the left), not paid or "sponsored" results (on the right), such as Google AdWords.

You can plan and execute your SEO campaign yourself using our SEO Guide or use our professional services by calling 01 225 840 490.

This is a ‘primer’ for the basics of SEO.

Please be clear that SEO is not about graphic design it is about making sure that your page(s) have well written code and follow the best practices within the coding and design to rank well.

Sites should be built for visitors not for search engines, so site usability is very important as it is visitors who are the [potential] customer not the search engine. Search engines can bring visitors but it is the site that will create business. Having said that no visitors = no possible customers so SEO is a crucial element to success.

One other point is worth noting. Much is said about Google PageRank. Put very simply PageRank is a link analysis ‘equation’, named after Larry Page, used by Google to assign a ‘number’ to a page to measure its relative importance.

Google clearly states that it uses over 200 factors to decide on whether any page appears in the SERP for a query. PageRank is only one of those 200 factors and on its own does not help much for ranking well for a particular query. It is far more important to Google to return the right result to the searcher rather than ‘just the most linked to page’.

Getting fit for SEO

Before even trying to improve your search engine results page ranking make sure that you are fit for SEO. This means making sure you follow the search engines’ ‘rules’.

Don’t forget the search engines can delist you; e.g. in 2006 Google delisted BMW in Germany for breaking the ‘rules’. This cost them millions.

As Google says, a good rule of thumb is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

The following “don’ts” are culled from the 3 main search engines: Google, Yahoo and bing.

• Don't add pages produced in great quantities, which have been automatically generated or which are of little value (cookie cutter pages).
• Don't build pages dedicated to redirecting the user to another page (doorway pages).
• Don't build pages primarily for the search engines or pages with excessive keywords.
• Don't build pages that give the search engine different content than that the end user sees (cloaking).
• Don't build pages that harm the accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results.
• Don't create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behaviour, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other bad-ware.
• Don't excessively cross link with other sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity (link schemes).
• Don't misuse competitor names.
• Don't use excessive pop-ups which interfere with user navigation.
• Don't use hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use lots of irrelevant words. This includes stuffing image ALT tags.
• Don't use numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames or site names.

Valid code

Code hints:

Do:

• Use the W3C validator to clean your code - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the standards HTML and CSS for web pages. They also provide free tools to validate your code.

Why do you need to worry about validation?

One reason for this is the difference between search engine spiders and browsers. Spiders crawl the web indexing web pages and their content. They are basically toned-down web browsers concerned content. So search engine spiders are looking at the same code as your web browser and in a very similar way. But the difference in functionality is vast.

There is great pressure on browser developers to ensure that their browsers display pages correctly. This often includes forgiving errors in the source code. Improperly nested elements, unclosed tags, unrecognized parameters – these are all errors in HTML code that might not affect your web page’s display in a browser. When it comes to search engine spiders it can be an entirely different story.

That doesn't mean small errors in your code will spell death for your search engine rankings. But errors can disrupt a spider parsing your page for all relevant content or make some of that content invisible. SEO requires close attention to every little detail of your site so why cause problems for search engines when they try to index your pages?

Site structure

Site structure hints:

Do:

• Use a directory structure that makes your content clear
• Use simple URLs that make the content clear
• Make sure you only have one URL for the same content Use – (hyphens) for page names and not _ (underscores)

Don’t:

• Have too many levels of directory within directory within…
• Use lengthy URLs
• Use generic names like “/direc1/” and "/page1.html"
• Mix www. and non-www. pages in your site
• Use capitalised URLs
• Have many URLs with the same content

Site structure can provide search engines with useful clues. Well described categories and filenames can be more easily read.

Which makes more sense to you? This:

http://www.ccpr.org.uk/NR/exeres/697522EC-5298-48B1-9559-D18BD26750E6

or this:

http://www.e-crm.co.uk/newsletters/2010/website-lead-generation.html

It’s the same for the search engine and the person. Do you have any idea what the first URL is about? Is the second URL clearer?

Also don’t forget that someone might link to your page using the URL of that page as the ‘anchor text’ just as above. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than a load of ‘gobbledegook’.

Navigation

Navigation hints:

Do:

• Make links simple HTML if possible
• Check for broken links
• Use a link title to add information

Don’t:

• Use pure JavaScript menus – search engines don’t read it well

Navigation is one of the most important things for visitors and for the search engines. As a search engine visits each website it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites and dead links are noted and used to update their index. The easiest links for search engines to crawl are simple html.

Remember:

• Visitors want navigation and links to be simple and one click
• Search engine crawlers want navigation and links to be easy and quick.

Here is the same navigation link before and after SEO. On the site they look the same, but all the ‘design’ elements were placed outside the link HTML in SEO. You can see that the second one is easier to read (for a human as well as the search engine) and conveys more information.

Before

<tr><td><a href="house.html"><img src="images/btnHouseU.jpg" alt="House &amp; Garden" name="Image2" width="180" height="28" border="0" id="Image2" onmouseover="MM_swapImage('Image2','','images/btnHouseO.jpg',1)" onmouseout="MM_swapImgRestore()" /></a></td> </tr>

After

<li><a href="georgian-country-house.html" title="Dates the house will be open to visitors">House &amp; Garden</a></li>

Page title

Page title hints:

Do:

• Use a title that effectively communicates the page's content.
• Create unique page titles for each page

Don't:

• Use a title that has no relation to the content on the page
• Use vague titles like "Untitled" or "New Page 1"
• Use lengthy titles or stuff it with irrelevant keywords

A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document.

Create a unique title for each page on your site. Imagine the page title is the only information that a search engine has for your page. Would your page title tell it everything it needs to know about that page? Also, and very importantly, does it include the search phrase that a searcher may enter?

When your page appears in a SERP, the contents of the title tag will usually (but not always) appear in the first line of the results.

Words in the title are emboldened if they appear in the user's search query. This can help users recognize if the page is likely to be relevant to their search. Using descriptive words in your page title helps both users and search engines better understand the focus of the page.

Most major search engines display approximately 60 characters from a page's title tag in the title of a search result. There's no need to go past this many characters, as search engines may give less weight to words after a certain point.

Remember that some searchers only look at page title and not the page description.

Page description

Page desciption hints:

Do:

• Write a description that is better than competitors
• Write a description that sells your site/page
• Use unique descriptions for each page

Don’t:

• Write a description that has no relation to the page content
• Use pointless descriptions like "This is a webpage"
• Stuff the description with only keywords
• Paste the entire content of the document
• Use a single description across all or many of your site's pages

Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed within the <head> tag of your HTML document.

Description meta tags don't count in Google's ranking (nor do keyword meta tags), but they do (generally, but not always) appear on the SERP. As such they are your chance to sell your result better than the competition’s results.

The page description comes under the page title in the SERP. Whereas a page title can be 60 characters, a page description can be 160 characters or 20 – 30 words.

By having an empty description or not having a description that fills both lines of the snippet, you're giving the competition a slight advantage because they're now higher in the user's line of sight.

Headlines and subheadings

<h1>Most important</h1>
<h2>Next most important</h2>
<h3>Next most important</h3>
<h4>Next most important</h4>
<h5>Next most important</h5>
<h6>Next most important</h6>
<p>Standard importance</p>

Headline hints:

Do:

• Imagine you're writing a newspaper story
• Decide where to use headlines and sub headings

Don't:

• Use heading tags for style rather than structure
• Use text that isn't helpful in defining the structure of the page
• Use headings where italic <em> and bold <strong> may be better
• Jump about e.g. h1 then h4 then h6 then h2
• Use headings like confetti

Using semantic mark up can provide search engines with useful information about how your document is structured that wouldn't be possible with plain text.

Heading tags (h1 through to h6) are one form of semantic mark up and are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So they should be used wisely to reinforce the page's overall theme.

Wisely means telling the search engine how the page's content is structured. Heading tags are similar to the headlines and sub headings in a newspaper or the structure of an academic paper. They help convey where portions of content begin and end.

Heading tags also give visual cues to visitors as text in heading tags is often larger than normal text, which catches visitors' eyes and says: "Different content is below and here's what it's about."

Be selective with your words you don't have many words to work with using heading tags, so make them count. Use concise phrases that accurately describe the content below the heading tag.

Images

Image hints:

Do:

• Give your images detailed, informative filenames
• Add alt text to describe the image
• Provide good context for your image
• Make sure your directories put similar images together
• Specify a width and height for all images
• Link your logo to the homepage – it’s a de facto standard

Don’t:

• Don't 'embed' text inside images- search engines can't read it

Images used on your site are another way to get found as Google, for example, has image search and frequently inserts image search results in to the main search results too.

The filename gives clues about the subject matter of the image and “img001.jpg” says a lot less than “baby-walking.jpg”

The alt attribute is used to describe the contents of an image file.

<img src="baby-walking.jpg" alt="Our new babies first steps">

It's important because it provides useful information about the subject matter and visitors with visual impairments can't see images. Descriptive alt text provides these users with important information. Alts text is also used as the anchor text for images that link to another URL.

The page the image is on, and the content around the image (including any captions or image titles), provide search engines with important information about the subject matter of your image.

A good directory structure helps search engines understand images too. So a directory for apples and another for pears in a fruit site would be useful.

A web browser can begin to render a page even before images are downloaded, so knowing its dimensions is important for fast loading.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the text into which you add a hyperlink on a website.

Writing anchor text that accurately describes the content found at the destination of a link gives search engines and users more clues on what the page is about.

You can add more information by adding a link title that will appear when the mouse rolls over the link.

<a href="georgian-country-house.html" title="Dates the house will be open to visitors">House &amp; Garden</a>

robots.txt

You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. A robots.txt file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site.

This file, which must be named robots.txt, must be placed in the root directory of your site. You have to create a separate robots.txt file for sub-domains.

Examples:

The following example specifies that no robots should visit any URL starting with "/tmp/":

# robots.txt for http://www.example.com/
User-agent: * Disallow: /tmp/ # These will soon disappear

This example indicates that no robots should visit this site further:

# robots.txt for http://www.example.com/
User-agent: * Disallow: / # go away

This example allows all robots to go anywhere:

# robots.txt for http://www.example.com/
User-agent: * Allow: /

You can also control robots on a per page basis via robots meta-tags in the <head>:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

In the example above robots may traverse the page but not index it.

For reference:

• all is the same as index,follow
• follow allows all links on the page to be spidered as well
• index allows the page to be indexed by the spider
• nofollow prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages.
• noimageclick prevents the use of links directly to the images, instead there will only be a link to the page.
• noimageindex prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the text on the page can still be indexed.
• noindex prevents anything on the page from being indexed.
• none is the same as noindex,nofollow

Other useful metatags

Author:

<meta http-equiv="author" content="Richard Hill">

Copyright:

<meta http-equiv="copyright" content="Copyright 2010 E-CRM Solutions Ltd. All Rights Reserved ">

JavaScript

Search engines find it difficult to read JavaScript which can make web pages more interactive and dynamic.

It can also clutter up the page, e.g:

<script type="text/javascript"> <!-- function MM_findObj(n, d) { //v4.01 var p,i,x;; if(!d) d=document; if((p=n.indexOf("?"))>0&&parent.frames.length) {d=parent.frames[n.substring(p+1)].document; n=n.substring(0,p);} if(!(x=d[n])&&d.all) x=d.all[n]; for (i=0;!x&&i<d.forms.length;i++) x=d.forms[i][n]; for(i=0;!x&&d.layers&&i<d.layers.length;i++) x=MM_findObj(n,d.layers[i].document); if(!x && d.getElementById) x=d.getElementById(n); return x;}</script>

It is, generally, better to link the Javascript in a way similar to linking to an image by putting the Javascript in a directory called Scripts and indicating the path to that file. JavaScripts can be put in the <head> or in the <body> as appropriate.

<script type="text/javascript" src="../Scripts/name-of-file.js"></script>

Flash & other ‘rich media’

Flash is used to create web ‘films’ (or vector graphics-based animation programs!) and can have full-screen navigation interfaces and illustrations.

Flash gives much more creative room than HTML, but requires a Flash plug-in on the computer running it.

Not all search engines can index Flash and it is more difficult for them to understand and index than an HTML site.

Other ‘rich media’ such as videos cannot be crawled, so you might consider creating a transcript of the video you want to include, or provide a detailed description of the video inside your HTML. If you have video content, you can host it on YouTube, or a number of other video hosting providers.

Best advice is to use ‘rich media’ only where it is needed use HTML for content and navigation. This makes your site more search engine friendly and makes it accessible to a larger audience including readers with visual impairments, or non-standard browsers and those with limited or low-bandwidth connections such as a mobile phone or device.

Analytics

Take advantage of web analytics services. Probably the best known is Google Analytics which is free.

You can analytics to:

• See more about how users reach and behave on your site
• Learn the most popular content on your site
• Measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site (e.g. did changing those title and description meta tags improve traffic from search engines?)
• See who reaches certain pages – e.g. checkout finish page

For Google analytics all you have to do is open an account and add a JavaScript to your template or to each page you want to track. The script is provided with your account.

Webmaster tools

Make use of free webmaster tools

Major search engines, including Google and bing provide free tools for webmasters.

Tools won't help your site get preferential treatment; however, they can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results.

Google Webmaster tools for example helps you to:

• see which parts of a site Google had problems crawling
• upload an XML Sitemap file
• analyze and generate robots.txt files
• remove URLs already crawled by Google
• specify the preferred domain
• identify issues with title and description meta tags
• understand the top searches used to reach a site
• get a glimpse at how Google sees pages
• remove unwanted site-links that Google may use in results
• receive notification of quality guideline violations

XML sitemaps

Sitemaps are another way to tell search engines about pages. In its simplest form a sitemap is an XML file that lists pages for a site with additional information so that search engines can crawl the site better.

N.B. using a sitemap does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines. You can generate a sitemap at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ amongst other sites.

If your site is quite small with good navigation then it is probably not worth adding a sitemap.

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