Tip of the Knows: Search Engine Optimization (Part 2 of 3)

Thursday, April 17, 2008  

Earlier this week I posted part one of a three part series on optimizing your EditMe site for search engines. This second installment covers content optimization, including page names, keyword usage and linking.

Step 2. Optimize your content

The most important factor in whether search engines consider your site a good fit for certain keywords is the content. As mentioned in step 1, your site needs to be about your target keywords. You'll need to provide content that a reasonable person would consider relevant to somebody searching for your target keywords. You don't need to provide hundreds of pages of content, but the over-all topic of your site should be relevant to your target keywords, and there should be sufficient content there to be considered useful.

When a search engine crawls your site, it looks at the visible text and structure of your site. This includes the page name, page title, the headings, the paragraph content, alternative image text, and links. Let's look at each of these in some detail:

• Name your pages carefully. Using names like page1, page2, page3 does nothing for your search results. Page names should include keywords that describe the content of the page. Whenever possible, use the title of your page to name it. Though I haven't seen hard data to back it up and don't do it at www.editme.com, there is some consensus that using dashes to separate words in a page name helps search engines determine the keywords in the name. For example: wiki-content-management instead of WikiContentManagement.  
• Page titles (the text that appears in the browser window's title bar) are often considered one of the most important areas of content optimization. Your target keywords should be used in a meaningful way within the page title of your home page. EditMe automatically inserts the Site Name (as defined in your Site Settings) as well as the page title in the title of each page. Assuming your site is named appropriately and your pages have meaningful titles, this should happen automatically. But you should review them with your target keywords in mind.  
• Headings are the bold heading text at the top of each EditMe page, and any headings you format using the Format drop down in the editor within your page content. These shouldn't just be bold text... make sure your headings are in H1, H2 or H3 tags. This tells the search engines that the words in the heading describe the content below it. Your keywords should be used whenever it makes sense in heading text.  
• Paragraph content should provide meaning and useful information about your keywords. Using your keywords in content is great, but don't create  content specifically to use the keywords. That's not going to create useful or meaningful content.  
• Images displayed on your site should be named descriptively: use the text in the image to name the file, or describe the image in the name of the file. When inserting an image, you should also give it an alternative text description. You can do this within the Insert/Edit Image dialog in EditMe's editor.  
• Link to other pages of your site within the content. For example, the first paragraph you see at www.editme.com contains links to important top-level pages, and the linked text is descriptive of what's found on that page. This helps search engines determine what the page is about and shows that you want people to learn more about those words on that page.

 
Meta tags, it should be noted, are not considered by most search engines to determine relevancy. Since they're not what visitors to your site actually see, it makes sense to focus instead on the content they do see. 

Finally, forget about algorithms and gaming the system... the search engine developers are pretty smart folks, and will often penalize you for trying to trick them. They are trying to provide searchers with the most relevant sites in response to their search query. The best way to be among those listed is to be relevant. There is no magic pill or shortcut for this one. Flooding your site with keywords for no reason will usually work against you.