Getting good search results for your pages

First thing you should know is that search engine optimization (SEO) is a moving target; search technology is always changing and responding to spammers' ever-increasing ploys and tactics. Next thing: this document (written in the Summer of 2008) is not authored by a search expert, just another web writer trying to find her way and sharing what she found.

Google is, by far, the most commonly used search engine today, so start with Google's guidelines, then move on to Yahoo's. If nothing else, read this document and Google's When your site is ready. For more detail, see these resources:

• Google: Webmaster Guidelines
• Google: Site title and description
• Google: Meta tags

Six basic steps

These suggestions are excerpted in part from Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Rajan Sodhi's SEO for Dummies, Larisa Thomason's Using ALT and TITLE Attributes.

Summary

Here are the most important steps to make your pages appear in searches through Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Each point is described in more detail in this document.

• Identify your keywords - the most important words or two-to-three-word phrases on your page. More »
• Include your keywords in your page title. More »
• Repeat these keywords in your content appropriately, without sounding forced. Repetition helps increase your relevance to the keywords. More »
• Keep your content useful and up-to-date. The more often users return, the better your rank. More »
• Use ALT and TITLE attributes and include your keywords in them. More »
• Be sure that other sites link to yours (including the College of Engineering site). More »

Keywords

Keywords are the essential terms that users would search on to find your page. Your users will find your information and pages better if you spend some time thinking about the most important words, and their synonyms and make sure to include them on your pages. If you can take it a step farther, think about the distribution of keywords across all your pages.

A note of caution: Loading your text with synonyms could be confusing to the reader. Terms still needs to be used consistently.

• Focus on one to two keywords per page. If the content is more diverse than two keywords, consider whether it should be more than one page.

Title and description meta tags

Pages that include the most important search terms in the <title> and description meta tags have a higher ranking and result in more users clicking on the links. Here's what these tags look like in the html code, with suggestions for creating them:

• <title>Engineering Co-op: Paid Interships for College Credit</title>
  

  o Capitalize in title case.
  o Put the most important words first.
  o Make it as descriptive as possible of what's on the page.
  o Include the most important keywords, but generally fewer than 12 words.

• <meta name="description" content="Co-op connects students with employers for paid internships, college credit and relevant work experience">
  

  o Include (repeat) essential words (co-op).
  o Offer synonyms for essential keywords (co-op, internship, work).
  o Introduces more important keywords (students, employers, paid, college, credit, experience) in fairly natural language.

Keyword meta tags

Keyword meta tags are not as important as they used to be and not as important as title and description meta tags. Spammers have loaded hundreds of irrelevant terms in keyword meta tags so search engines have had to respond.

But they are still used by search engines. The Bruce Clay site states, "Our research is that keyword meta tags are not ignored and that they actually do count. ... Perhaps words are ignored if and only if they do not appear in the content of the page - but they are used if they are in the content."

"Even if tags are ignored today, it only takes a few minutes to do it right, you would never be penalized for having them (unless you spam), and not all engines will ignore them and maybe not forever. You can never go wrong by using META tags, and only hurt yourself if you don't use them."

• <meta name="keywords" content="Co-op, Coop, Internship, Work, Job, Credit, Earn, Student, Employer, Employment, Paid, Experience" />
  

  o Include the terms you expect users to enter in their search.
  o Include common misspellings in the keyword list (ex: Co-op and Coop).
  o Include variations on nouns and verbs (ex: employer, employment).
  o Make sure the terms also appear in your content.
  o Begin each word in your keywords list with an initial capital letter.

Don't be a "spamdexer"

"Spamdexing" is adding too many keywords and/or words that are not repeated in your content.

• Don't use the same keywords on all your site pages. For example, "Engineering, UW" used to be in all the keyword meta tags for the CoE site. We've removed those.

Dynamic, relevent content

Keep your content fresh and relevent. Return traffic is great in helping your rankings and Google looks for content that is "dynamic" (regularly changing or updated), especially on the home page.

Keywords in the content

The content of each page on your site should have a focused topic and use a few keywords that are repeated throughout the page, starting with the page title, headings, and body. The more focused and repeated the content is, the more searchable the page becomes.

Review your content to make sure the keywords, especially two- and three-word phrases, are in the content. Repeat these phrases. Some search engines take site descriptions from within the page, not from the Meta description fields, excluding some appropriate keywords unless you use them throughout your content.

Bruce Clay recommends you:

• Link pages together using the keywords of the landing page in the anchor text of the sending page.
• Use text links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are related.

ALT and TITLE attributes

ALT attributes are required for images. They describe, briefly, images and icons for folks who have images turned off and who use screen readers. They also help your search results when you include important keywords.

• <img src="images/student2.jpg"      alt="Lee Smith, undergrad researcher in electrical engineering's FuNLab" />
  

  TITLE attributes, as described by Larisa Thomason on the NetMechanic site, can be used to "... describe links, tables, individual table rows, and other structural HTML elements. ...many search engine ranking algorithms read the text in TITLE attributes as regular page content."

• <table width="200" border="0" title="Admission Statistics for Engineering Departments">
  

In-bound links

Other sites linking to your web site is one big way Google and other search engines measure the popularity of your web site. Links from highly ranked sites (sites that appear near the top of searches) may increase your ranking quicker than links from a lot of less highly ranked sites.

• Make sure interested organizations know your web address and relevant content.
• Publicize your site to the other Engineering departments, CoE, student organizations, engineering organizations, etc.

How to determine which keywords to use

First, review the page and pick out the most important terms. Make sure those are in the TITLE tag and in headings. In the keywords metatag, include synonyms for those words. Also, incorporate the synonyms in the text of the page, if you can do so without confusing the users. This is not a reason to add paragraphs, or even sentences to your page. Brevity is still key.

SEO tools

Use a web analytics tool to find out which terms users searched on to land on your web site:

• Urchin is a Google tool that analyzes traffic on websites, even on content behind a security firewall or on an intranet or internal network (unlike Google Analytics). Urchin provides reports on your visitors - where they come from, how they use your site, what converts them into customers, etc.
• Google Analytics has helpful SEO features and is easy to use for those who don't have firewall issues. It also now has Website Optimizer tools.

Here's a small sample of search terms that landed users on CoE's web site. Notice the variations for the same topics. Consider searching for spelling and punctuation variations and see if your site is listed.