Search Engine Optimization

SEO - A Case Study: QuoteACopier.com

Dave — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:18:00 GMT

This post talks about applying search engine optimization strategies to web pages, while working in parallel with a content designer.

Recently I was contacted by web designer who built QuoteACopier.com. The owners of the site want to increase awareness about their services for providing pricing information and advice to buyers of digital copiers. The website wasn't coming up anywhere in search results and they asked me to take a look at the site to see what could be done to improve search engine page rank.

The company provides good information, but they typically deliver this information on the phone. In order for search engines to be aware of the value they offer customers, this content needs to be brought to the web. As always, the golden rule of building optimized web pages is to make specific pages that provide valuable information to the people who are looking for it.

There were two challenges: To improve search engine visibility, and to organize the site in such a way that the work to optimize the page is separate from the design of the page, so that the design could easily be changed with minimal impact to the optimization work.

The website was built using ASP (not ASP.NET). To separate the design from the optimization, we created a template and used ASP server side includes. We also made a piece of code to read content from .htm files and insert that content at the right places. This allowed us to make one page that had layout in the right places, and the content in separate .htm files. That makes it easy for the designer to use any tools to work on the HTML, and the SEO analyst to design the structure of the page.

The template has a header section, title section, and body section. The header section contains a place holder for meta keywords and meta description tags.

Once the template was made, we made one page for each phrase that the customer wanted to match a customer search. For example, if the customer enters 'prices on copiers', the customer would land on the prices on copiers page of the QuoteACopier.com site. The template places the content elements of the page in the intended places, and allows designers to work in parallel.

Search Engine Optimization Resources

Dave — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:54:00 GMT

Search Engine Optimization Resources

Links:
Submit your website to Google for indexing
Submit your website to Yahoo for indexing
Submit your website to MSN for indexing

Everything you ever wanted to know about Search Engines (and a whole lot more):
SearchEngineWatch.com - A website dedicated to tracking the Search Engine Industry
Matt Cutts's Blog - A web blog written by someone inside Google, great insite
Microsoft SEO Tips - Microsoft's Tips on making Search Engine Friendly Pages

Information about RSS News Feeds and Readers:
How to explain RSS the Oprah way

SEO Tools:
Link Popularity Checker - Software (free download), tells you how many sites link to your web site.

Geek stuff:
The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
This article is a bit out of date by now but still informative. It explains the core concepts beneat Google's fameous PageRank system.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - Some more useful information on how Google (and other search engines) index pages.

How do I optimize my web site? Making your website Search Engine Friendly

Dave — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:44:00 GMT

Here are some quick simple tips to follow to make your web page search engine friendly. Follow these steps and you're 90% of the way there.

Search engines are designed to return pages that are highly relevant to a keyword search phrase typed into the search box on their site. If you want your page to show up in the results, start by making your page relevant to a specific search phrase. Select the search phrase you want to optimize for and write it down so that you can focus on it. Try to keep it to 3 key words or less if you can.
Create a web page with a file name that contains your key word search phrase. Don’t use spaces in the file name, instead, use underscore (“_”) or hyphen (“-“) characters. It used to be the case that you would get better results on Google if you use the hyphen character but it no longer matters. Don’t worry about the name of the directory it is in.
Add a HTML title to your web page using your key words to start the title. Try to keep your title in the 5-8 word range.
Add a META DESCRIPTION tag to your web page to suggest an abstract to search engines to show in search results. Search engines may or may not use your description, it varies. The description should contain your key words and be approximately 90 characters long (including spaces).
Add a META KEYWORDS tag to your page. Most major search engines don’t put a lot of weight into your keywords tag, but some do, and most consider it at least somewhat. Use only your search phrase in here. You don’t want to look like you are trying to SPAM the search engine here.
Create a headline on your page using the H1 Tag, and make sure the headline contains your key words. Your headline could be the same as your page title, but this is not required. It better to have a little diversity.
Add content to your page that is very relevant to your search phrase. Ideally make sure to have 500-800 words.

Search Engine Optimization Basics

Dave — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:56:00 GMT

What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of modifying the content of your web page so that it is easier for your target audience to find your website when they search the web using a search engine. When someone goes to a search engine like Google or MSN, they'll type in a search phrase. When they click that search button the search engine serves up a list of results, usually ten. If the web surfer doesn't like the first ten results, there will be a button to see more results. However, most people are going to find a link to a site that looks good to them on the first or second page of results. If you want you can buy a sponsored link that appears on the top of the list of results, or on the side, but that can add up to a lot of money. Another approach is to try to optimize your web pages so that they naturally appear in the first ten links returned by the search engine.

Important Factors that Impact Placement
There are lots of search engines out there. The biggest ones are Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. Each one has it's own method of indexing pages and figuring out in what order those pages should be presented to the web surfer doing the search. The most important thing is that the search engines know about your site and include your pages in their index. If they don't, you'll never show up no matter what you do.

Getting indexed by search engines
Most major search engines provide a page where you can go to submit your website or a particular web page for indexing. For example, here is Google's submit page:
Submit your website to Google for indexing
(Some people beleive that Google no longer processes submissions)
Submit your website to Yahoo for indexing
Submit your website to MSN for indexing

A second way you can get your page indexed is to have a link to your page added to a page that is already indexed. Once search engines index a site they periodically revisit that site and crawl through all of it's pages and links. When the search engine sees a link to your site it will "discover" you, and start crawling your site.

Getting indexed by search engines
Before you submit your website, make sure your web pages are search engine friendly. Follow the link below for some tips on how to make your web page easy for search engines to index and understand what your page is about:
How do I optimize my web site? Making your website Search Engine Friendly

Relevancy vs. Page Rank
It's one thing to have your page indexed, it's another to appear at the top of the search engine results. Following the tips above on how to make your website search engine friendly will help, but it's not enough. The tips above will tell search engines that your page is RELEVANT to the phrase being searched for, but it won't tell search engines how good the QUALITY of the content is. Search engines measure quality as a numerical score, refered to by Search Engine Optimization experts as Page Rank, a phrase started by Google and now widely adopted. Search engines try to find the most relevant content of the highest quality to satisfy the needs of the person doing the search. So how does the search engine determine the quality of your content? A big part of that is how many people link to your web page. When pages link to your page, that's an indication to the search engine that someone thinks the content of your page is interesting and important. The search engine indexing will also consider how important the site is that is pointing to your site. A link from a very important site to your site is more important than several links to your site from other sites that are not considered so important.

Next steps
Now that you understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization, you're probably interested in taking steps to get your pages optimized and get the best page rank you can. It's going to take some time and some effort, but it can certainly be done. I recommend that you use a RSS News Reader and subscribe to this blog, so you can read the other articles I've written on the subject and receive new articles as I release them. You're going to need to:

Create search engine friendly pages
Promote your pages to improve your page rank

Do it yourself or hire an SEO specialist?
You can either do the optimization yourself or hire an SEO specialist. It depends on what kind of time you have, if you have a budget to spend on this, what tools you have and what your technical skills are. There are several aspects to the SEO process, and you can do some of them yourself and outsource other activities to other people. The important thing to understand is that setting up your pages is important, but promoting those pages to get good page rank is an ongoing marketing activity. Someone needs to create your website with search engine friendly pages, or modify your existing website to make it search engine friendly. After you have done that, you'll need to follow the advice in my other blog posts to see how you can promote your site's page rank.