Overview

The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to implement targeted keyword phrases into a website in an effort to reach a high rank on a search engine results page (SERP) for those keyword phrases. Once you know what keywords you want to focus on, the next step is to embed the targeted phrases in your site's pages. Effective techniques for doing this are called page factors optimization.

How Search Engines See Your Site

A web page is divided into many elements; (X)HTML tags, text, embedded objects, external file links, etc. The search engines parse a web page primarily looking at the text.

The text of a web page is divided into different areas, each of which a search engine weighs differently. For example, the text that appears as the title of your browser window is called title text, most text on the page is body text, text in the alt tag of an image is alt text.

The search engines read all these different areas and add your page to their database. When some one does a search, the search engine uses a custom proprietary algorithm to find pages that have the search phrase and rank the pages according to where and in what arrangement the term is present.

Page Coding Terminology

Several different types data come together on a web page to create what you see and how the page acts. The generic term for these different types of data is page coding.

Coding is primarily divided into three categories; markup via (X)HTML, style via CSS, and programming via JavaScript. All three are based on standards. The World Wide Consortium (W3C) maintains standards for (X)HTML and CSS. JavaScript standards are maintained by Ecma International.

There are two primary standards for page markup: HTML (HyperText Markup Language) & XHTML (eXtensable HyperText Markup Language). HTML is the original standard for web pages; XHTML combines HTML and XML standards to create a web page that is XML compliant. Since either style of markup can be used to build a successful website, we the acronym (X)HTML to refer to either standard.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows you to control the layout and style of your web content. JavaScript is a programming language that enables your site to do dynamic functions. Typical things that JavaScript is used for is browser form validation, dynamically modifying (X)HTML once the page has loaded and asynchronously sending and receiving data to the server (AJAX).

Phrase Arrangement Terminology

Phrase arrangement is fairly complex and requires a unique vocabulary. The terms are typically defined in relation to a targeted keyword phrase.

Frequency: How often a particular phrase appears on the page or within an area. Often a targeted phrase will need to be embedded in a page several times to achieve high rankings. In general, each area of text should contain 8 to 12 repeated keyword phrases.

Word Count: How many total words are in an area. Typically search engines like 300 to 800 total words per page. Each area has an optimum range for a word count.

Weight: The ratio of Frequency to Word Count. Aim for a weight of 1-2%.

Prominence: How close to the beginning of an area the phrase appears. In general, the closer a phrase appears to the front of an area the higher it will rank in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

Relation: How close terms in a multiple word phrase are to each other. For the term "Real estate agents", the complete phrase will rank higher than "For real estate services, call our agents..."

The Title Tag

The title tag is the single most important factor to consider when optimizing your web page. This is because most search engines and directories place a high level of importance on the keywords found in the title tag. This is also usually what search engines will use for the title of your site in the search results.

1. Put your keyword phrases into your title! Run a search in Google under any word and notice that the ads that come back all have the keyword you searched for bolded in the title and description. This demonstrates the importance of keyword phrases in search engines.
2. We recommend your title be between 6 and 10 words. If using longer words try to use less than 8 words.
3. Do not sacrifice a clear and descriptive title in your efforts to incorporate keyword phrases. Work until a nice medium is met between keyword usage and your site description. After all, if you have chosen good keywords relevant to your site they should fit nicely in any title/description of your business.
4. Do not just list target phrases as a title; this will look silly on a search page and may cause your target audience to ignore you.
5. Put your company name somewhere in your title. Corporate branding is always a positive.
6. Think of your title as a short sentence briefly describing your business. Say who and what you are with as few words as possible.

Let’s take a sample company that sells wedding gowns and wedding accessories. We'll call it "Bella Bridal." Now suppose we completed keyword research and found that most people search "wedding dresses" and "bridal accessories."

Suppose the original title for the site was:
Bella Bridal | Your Wedding Store

This title is a nice brief description of the site and it mentions "bridal" and "wedding", but a member of the targeted audience will most likely use keyword phrases, not single terms, and we decided to go after "wedding dresses" and "bridal accessories" because these were popular terms.

A title to make this a better optimized site would be:
Bella Bridal | Wedding Dresses and Bridal Accessories
This title could still be improved to grab attention on the search page, but at least it is simple and clear and includes optimum keyword phrases.

Optimizing Page Copy

Your page copy is what a visitor to your site reads to find out what you offer. Page copy makes up the bulk of what you see in a browser window. Search engines read page copy for keywords and this informs them how and where they should list your site. Therefore, when writing page copy you must focus on finding a balance between writing for customers and search engines.

1. Incorporate keyword phrases as often as possible without sacrificing the intelligence and clarity of your text.
2. Do not excessively use keywords. Repetitive use of the same keywords can be unprofessional to human readers and can be viewed as a "spamming" tactic by a search engine spider. It can even get your site banned from some engines.
3. Put more text on your page. If your homepage has numerous graphics and little text try replacing some of the graphics with text so more keywords can be used; this will help you in search engine rankings more than graphics.
4. Make every attempt to develop your first sentence of text on a page into a concise and attractive description of what your company does using keywords. This will most likely be the brief description under your title on a search page and you will want it to catch the eye of a potential customer searching for what you offer.

Emphasizing Page Text

There are several (X)HTML tags that imply emphasis on the targeted text. While these tags are used inside standard page text, most search engines will factor in the information when terms are emphasized.

The most important emphasized text element are headers. Headers are defined by <hn></hn> tags such as h1, h2, h3 to h7; h1 is considered more important that h2, and so on.
Use Rules:

1. Use an h1 or h2 tag for your page header.
2. Use h3, h4... for page subheaders.
3. Include as many keywords as possible in all headers.

Other important emphasis tags you might want to include are:

• <strong> - typically shown as bold text
• <em> (emphasize) - typically shown as italic text
• <b> (bold, depreciated)
• <u> (underline, depreciated)
• <i> (italic, depreciated)

Hint: Default header tags are displayed as large unattractive font. Styles should be applied to make them more attractive.

Optimizing Meta Tags

Meta means information about the page. The purpose of a meta tag is to tell search engines what the page is about. There are two important meta tags that you should include in between your site page head tags; the description and keyword meta tags. The text in these tags is not typically displayed in a browser.

Meta Description Tag

Example: <meta name="description" content="your site description">

1. Your meta description is a sentence describing that page. For your home page, describe the entire site. For interior pages, describe the topic of that specific page.
2. Usually you can just take a sentence from your page copy to insert here, as you should have a solid sentence explaining your business that begins your page copy (see the previous information on Optimizing Page Copy).
3. Try incorporating keywords here, but do not attempt to use all of them in a single sentence.

Meta Keywords Tag

Example: <meta name="keywords" content="keyword phrase 1, keyword phrase 2, etc.">

1. This is your opportunity to list your targeted keyword phrases and their variations.
2. Try listing synonyms, plurals and common misspellings, if there are any, of your products and services.
3. If your company pertains to a certain geographic location list this in the keywords meta tag. For example: "Dallas, Texas"
4. Do not be extremely repetitive of any words. For example:

Do not list: "horse saddles, horse bridles, horse blankets, horse collectibles"
Try instead: "horse stables, saddles, bridles, horse blankets"

*It may be seen as "spamming" by search engine spiders to repeat "horse" so much as in the first example.

Originally search engines looked at the meta tags as the primary source for keyword phrases. Due to increased competition for high search engine placement people began spamming search engines with meta tags overflowing with relevant and irrelevant keyword phrases. The description meta tag typically plays a small role in page rankings but is important because it is the text description of the page that many search engines display in their SERPs.

Today even the keyword meta tag has little influence on the SERPS. However, meta tags are important to include on a page for completeness, and every little edge helps when seeking high rankings.

Optimizing Images - The Alt Tag

Search engines do not read text embedded in images but they do read the alt attribute of an image tag as text.

Each image on a site can serve as a place to add keyword phrases and can aid in boosting search engine rankings. Use the alt attribute with any image on a site as a description of that image and of the site using keyword phrases.

1. Do not just list keywords in the alt tag. Instead create a brief five word description utilizing your keywords.
2. This is also be a good place to use common misspellings of keyword phrases since the alt tag only appears when the image is scrolled over.
3. Use the same keywords here as in the title tag, page copy, meta description and other tags.

One important item of note is that alt tags play an important role for making a website accessible to the visually impaired. Many search engine optimizers make alt tags too long and descriptive; the proverbial equivalent to building a wheelchair ramp to your office but making it wind around for miles. Always be considerate to this group by putting quality, descriptive alt tags on every image.

Optimizing hyperlinks and file names

Search engines read both the text that displays on a page as a link, called anchor text, and the file name that it is linked to. It can be beneficial to include targeted phrases in both.

In addition, the file name of the page itself is another factor search engines use. When naming files it is generally best to use hyphens or underscores to separate keywords. Try to keep file names to under six words. Example: services_wedding_dresses.html

Also the domain you are using can be a factor in the rankings. A website using www.bellabridal.com will get a boost for any phrase using bridal. Be careful not to go overboard with the domain name. Exceedingly long domain names are cumbersome to type and are not rewarded by the search engines.

Miscellaneous Areas

There are several other page areas where you can include keywords. Most have little impact on the search engines, but every bit helps.

Comment Tags
Example: <!-- comment -->
Comment tags are not shown in a browser, they are so (X)HTML coders can put notes in their code.

Title Attributes
Example: <h4 title="search engine optimized titles">Title Attributes</h4>
Title attributes are like alt attributes but can be applied to (X)HTML tags other than images. Their use is to provide more verbose descriptions of a page element.

Coding (X)HTML & CSS for SEO

While the style of your page's (X)HTML code does not impact your rankings the way text does, it does play a critical role. The primary rules for optimizing page code are:

1. Make sure your (X)HTML follows W3C standards. Search engines are built to parse standard (X)HTML. If they see improperly formatted code, they may not parse the pages of your site.
2. Work to increase the text content to code ((X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript) ratio. Search engines will only read a certain amount of your page. If your pages are filled with excessive (X)HTML code, they will not see all the text content. The key for minimizing (X)HTML code is hand coding pages using expertly optimized (X)HTML and CSS. Avoid WYSISYG web design software such as FrontPage, NetObjects Fusion, Microsoft Word, etc.
3. Place important keyword content as close to the top of the page code as possible. Clever use of table structures or CSS positioning can achieve this goal.

Page markup can have different levels of quality. The basic level of quality you will want to assure your site is search engine optimized is W3C valid code. Markup can be declared strict or transitional. Either will work for search engine optimization.

Additional levels of (X)HTML quality include:

• Tableless design - An old practice for laying out web pages is to use table structures. Tables are only meant for displaying tablular data, not for page layout. Tableless design is the practice of converting all layout tables to <div> tags and CSS.
• Semantic markup - This is the practice of encoding context for your content in your (X)HTML tags. Following semantic markup practices does not have a significant impact on your page's placement in the search engines. However, it is an evolving standard and may have an impact in the future.

The rule for CSS is simple, keep as much as possible in external CSS style sheets. The goal for a well optimized site would be to have all style information in external style sheets. The goal for JavaScript is the same. Keep as much as posible in .js files.

Coding JavaScript / AJAX driven sites

JavaScript is increasingly being used to create more dynamic websites. In particular the use of AJAX techniques is increasing. AJAX is a practice of using JavaScript to fetch page content from the server and dynamically embed it on a web page with out doing a standard web page request. If not done properly, this technique will prevent the search engines from spidering your site's content.

The correct method for AJAX sites is to use unobtrustive JavaScript. A website using unotrusive JavaScript produces web pages standard hyperlinks without JavaScript embeded in tags. It then binds the required JavaScript in an external JavaScript function. This is also called degrading gracefully because browsers without JavaScript, including the search engine bots, will navigate the site using standard hyperlinks. Those with JavaScript enabled browsers will experience the AJAX experience via the binded dynamic functions.

The most important factor is never use JavaScript hrefs in your hyperlinks. <a href="javascript:window.location=example.html">Example</a>. Instead you can use external JavaScript. Example:

<script type="text/javascript">
	document.onload = function () {
		document.getElementById('example-link').onclick = "window.location=example.html";
	}
</script>
...
<a id="example-link" href="example.html">Example</a>

What To Avoid

The most important thing to avoid in SEO is anything the search engines would consider spamming. The primary rule to determine if something might be considered spam is to ask: Have you added any text that the search engines will see but human visitors will not?

One of the most common forms of spamming is hiding keywords using a tag or stylesheet to make the text the same color as the page background. Another popular spamming tactic is "stealthing" which involves creating specific pages for search engines that are covered in keywords, and directing customers to regular website pages.

Another circumstance you want to avoid is over optimization. The search engines realize there are optimizers that are trying to manipulate them. Each search engine posts a list of guidelines for ethical search engine optimization. Read and follow their published guidelines.

Search engines look for pages that are too perfectly optimized for a phrase. For example, if you put a phrase in every page area a search engine might flag the page as too perfect and apply a penalty. Try to give your page a natural flow, do not worry about optimizing every page area.

Stay the Course

Optimizing your website for search engines will take time and unfortunately there is not a formula for guaranteed success. Throughout the entire process from keyword research and selection to the actual optimization you will look at many different factors that must be considered when optimizing. Each site and style of business is different, so the importance of each factor and the way to approach SEO will vary for each company.

Once you finish optimizing your site you have to sit back and wait (and work on link building - see linking strategies.) Give the search engines time to spider your site and decide to list it. Once your site has been spidered give it some time to take off and move up. Typically three to six months is adequate. Be sure to monitor search engine rankings and site traffic.

After a while if you are unhappy with your site’s SERP ranking consider doing more research, changing up your keywords and re-optimizing your site. This is sometimes necessary to get optimum search page ranking. In addition, if you sell a product that changes as trends change, you will most likely have to re-optimize your site as new trends increase in popularity.