SEO Technology: Optimize for Best Search Engine Placement
November 20, 2008SEO Technology for Search Engine Placement is HOT these days. And with good reason. It's cheap, results are long lasting and, if done correctly, it can target visitors more precisely. With all of the seo services and experts touting top page results the task may seem daunting.
If you're willing to brave through some of your websites source code with me, I can show you the basics, which is pretty much all you need to make a dramatic start.
First and foremost, you must Must MUST do your keyword research. I'd hate for you to do all this optimizing for the wrong keywords. If you're not sure how, read this article in SEO Technology: Keyword Research.
When you've found your killer keyword and keyword variations, we're going to be putting them in your title tag, H1 tag, and sprinkled throughout your article with various emphasis tags (bold, italicized, underlined...) To get you started, this is all you'll need to remember. So lets dig into the details.
Title and
Description:
Your web pages title tag is #1 in the SEO game. It will be the title of
your listing in the
search engines. Search engines and visitors alike rely heavily
upon your title tag, so make this one your best effort. You'll want to
customize this tag for every page of your website. It make take some
creative word combinations to get it perfect but it's well worth it.
To make it easier to understand, think of it in terms of a newspapers classified advertisement. Your title is your ads headline, and your description is your ads text copy.
The title tag in general should be 12 - 14 words and have your keyword first or as close to the beginning as possible.
Google doesnt use the meta description tag anymore, but other search engines still do. Its best to prepare one nonetheless. Your description tag sould be 18-21 words, should repeat your keyword and describe your page as best as possible.
The trick here is to combine SEO with good salesmanship. With very few words, you will be charged with the task of pleasing two audiences at once (search engines and site visitors). You're trying to define exactly what your page is about while creating enough interest to get people to click on your listing and read your article. Once you understand how to get what to go where in a search engine listing, writing something that captures attention is all thats left.
Let's look at some examples of good Titles and Descriptions.
The following results (photo below) is inspired by a discussion on sphinn. The accusation was that google was somehow giving blogger, their own blogging platform more push to get it listed first before all other blog platforms, specifically wordpress.
So, I did a search for "blog". wordpress didnt even show up. Blogger came in first. Sound suspicious?
Then I did a search for "blog tool", since that's what
wordpress
is optimized for.
I used the SEO Quake firefox extension to show data for each listing.
boingboing.com beats out WordPress for #1 spot on google, even with a PR4 (page rank) over WordPress' massive PR9. Basically they had the keyword that I searched for repeated more times in their google listing than wordpress did. Sometimes SEO does win. but dont overdo it, there is such a thing as keyword spam.
(as a side note, the reason why wordpress loses 1st spot in most searches is frankly because WordPress' SEO kinda sucks. but in agreement with a comment in the discussion, they dont need search engine ranking or placement, their blog platform is good. When your site is good, people know about it.)
Walking you through this type of example should help when you're picking your keywords, remember to check this data so you know how much competition you're looking at. Its quick. Its painless. Its half of the equation in your keyword research.
Ok, so now I need to show you where to put this stuff. This time, the example comes the winner of the #1 spot in google for the term "search engine optimization", wikipedia. (heck, if you're gonna learn, learn from the best.)
The title of your page, will always come from the title tag in your code. We'll take a look at the code in a minute. First, notice that their listings description (above) is coming from the 1st paragraph on the website (below). When you're writing your webpage, keep this in mind and optimize the first 20 to 30 words of your pages actual content.
Also notice below, the keyword is their very first word of their text, and its set in bold. And to go that extra step, they have words related to their keyword, linking to other pages on the site. (links are in blue) Bravo! wikipedia, and thanks for the great example.
Ok, so it's time to put this all together. In the image below, I cleaned up wikipedias source code to show you whats going on here.
See that the words "Search engine optimization - Wikipedia..." are between the <title> and </title> tags. This is where you'll put your title. Simple. The meta tag is where you would normally put your description. They decided to leave out the description and keep their meta keywords, but its written the same way. (a metatag generator can write meta code for you)
They use their <h1> tag for the name of the article, repeating their keyword. And finally, as we saw in the screenshot of their page in a web browser, their keyword was repeated one more time as the first word in the first paragraph of text, and the font was set in bold.
And thats the bulk of it.
Now that you've got the basics, the rest is cake. Just write really good content. And instead of dumping keywords all over the place, use the same 1 or 2 keywords thoughtfully placed throughout the article, with a lot of related words that help define your keyword. As search engines get better at simulating human behavior, you'll see that writing for good search engine placement will come almost naturally.
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