Search Engine Optimization

Definition

Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) is a process of applying many techniques to make your web site rank high on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines.

SEO Techniques

After a short search on the web you will come up with some good, in depth articles on optimizing your pages for search engines. Rimini Software will educate you on how to properly apply these techniques to improve your site's ranking. An effective SEO strategy will use many of these techniques.

The goal is to have your page ranked high enough that it is displayed on the first page of search results. To do that your site must be considered authoritative by the search providers such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. That is why "content is king" is what people talk about. Of course there's more to it than that.

The Good News: Coming up with a SEO strategy and sticking with it will improve your search engine results.
The Bad News: It's going to take up to 6 months to a year before you get meaningful results. There is a lot of competition out there and being successful isn't going to happen overnight.

Search engines are not created equal. Google is by far the most used search provider on the Internet. On web sites that we monitor (we monitor all of our customer sites), Google accounts for about 90% of traffic that comes from search providers.

meta tags

These are HTML tags that are placed in the <HEAD> section of a web page. Important ones are TITLE, KEYWORDS, and DESCRIPTION.

TITLE

This is what you name the web page. Each page on your site should have a unique title that is descriptive of the content. The title will be displayed on the browser's top bar and will also be used as the search result title. If you don't have a TITLE tag, your page will be listed as "Untitled" - not good.

Keep it brief and to the point. If your page is about fire extinguishers, the title should be something like: "ReddyOrNot.Com | Fire Extinguishers".

Titles are important but they will only help you if they are topical to your content. For instance, if every page in your web site has the same title, that isn't going to help you.

DESCRIPTION

This is a BRIEF description of the page content. Each page should have a unique description. The description tag is displayed by search engines underneath the TITLE. It is your chance to say something that will entice a customer to click on your link.

Why keep BRIEF? You need to convey your description in less than 160 letters and spaces. Anything after that number will not be displayed in a search result.

You can and should add more to the description than 160 characters. Add in other bits that might be interesting to search engines. Lets say you sell a Widget. Your description would include the Widget's name in the first 160 characters. If there is a common misspelling of your Widget, include that in the description after 160 characters.

KEYWORDS

Back in the old days before search providers got a lot more sophisticated, the KEYWORDS meta tag was very important. It is still used to rank a page but has a much smaller impact on a page rank. Each page should have a unique keywords.

Think about all the words that someone would search on to find this page. Add those to your keywords. Include misspellings if applicable. Keep the keywords topical to the content on the page. You can have as many keywords as you like - but keep it topical.

Content

Your goal is to create a site that the search engines consider authoritative and topical to a particular keyword search. Most of this has to do with you writing something on the topic and posting it on your web site. But there are other things you can do to get listed above most of your competitors.

Your job is to make it easy for search engines to figure out what the topic is for your page and make it easy for them to index. IMPORTANT - the title, keywords, description, and content should be about the same topic and have some depth.

Heading Tags and Boldness

A well formed page uses Header Tags (h1, h2, h3, etc) OFTEN. This not only breaks up a page so it doesn't look like one big glob of text that no one wants to read. These tags are used by search engines to guess at what the page is about.

A search engine's crawler will read your code. It doesn't actually view your page in a browser. A crawler will come across the HTML tag "h1" and assume that this is an important heading about the content that follows. A "h2" tag would be a sub-topic, h3 another, and so on. If the Headers include keywords and the content is about the Header, you're on the right track.

You can also bold words or sentences to highlight parts that are important. Just don't over do it because that makes a page annoying to look at.

Images

Images are important to a page. They help the viewer get a sense for what the page is about quickly and without reading.

Each image should have a "alt" tag that is displayed if a customer has images turned off. And since search engine crawlers don't view your page, they will use this to figure out what the picture is - it is another opportunity to use your keywords.

You should also use descriptive words for the image file. AA01.jpg doesn't mean much to anyone but the person who created it. Using "widget.jpg" is more descriptive.

On a design note, you should know something about how to create an image for a web page. Images for the web do not need to be high resolution. They should be sized accordingly. Poorly sized images can have a seriously negative impact on your web site if they slow it down so much that customers leave before they have a chance to load.

If you have an image from a digital camera, it will likely be 1200 x 1600 pixels - far larger than most users computer screens. An image that size could also be 1mb or more in size. One your web site, the image would probably be scaled down to 300 x 500, for example. Resize your image to that size and then save it at 85% quality. You will not notice a difference on a computer screen but the file size will go down to about 40kb - a huge difference.

Tables

Tables are used to display data in a well laid out, easy to understand manner. Table headers, column headers, and row headers, are tags that can include your keywords.

It used to be common practice for web designers to use tables to organize page content. Each row and cell of the table would be a section of the screen. This leads to really complicated tables that are a real pain to work with and very difficult to maintain. Your web site's layout and styling should be done using cascading style sheets (CSS). Using CSS not only gives you far greater control it also makes the web site's code much more maintainable.

Flash

Just don't go there. Save some money and do something else. Indexing the content of a Flash page is difficult... If you're like many of us, pages that heavily rely on Flash are not so much fun to view unless they are done really, really well. If you have the money and a big name, go for it. Many users find Flash ads to be so annoying that they disable Flash. That doesn't do you much good if your rely on it and you customers can't see what you have invested in.

In most cases it is best to avoid spending money on Flash-only pages. You can add videos to make your page more interesting but these should be add-ons to the overall content.

Update Often

If your page remains static, the search engines won't visit as often. When a page is first noticed by a search engine, they will visit your site and look at each page over a period of time (days, weeks). After they are done, they will come back now and then to see if anything has changed. If nothing gets changed, well, you get the idea.

Your site should be updated often with new content and revised content. That will keep the search engines coming back. Your page will appear actively maintained and that's a good thing.

File Naming

Let's say you search for Sea Kayaks and the top two results have filenames "sea-kayaks.html" and "page12aug99.html". Which are you going to click on?

File names are important for two reasons. First, if they are easily understood then your customers will know quickly what the page is about. Second, it is yet another opportunity for you to use a keyword that the search engines will pick up on.

SEO For E-Commerce

If your using an e-commerce package to sell your goods on the web, it can be difficult to figure out how to give each page a unique title, keywords, and description. Most systems have some mechanism, such as templates and variables, that you can use if you know what you are doing.

We have used PDG Commerce for many customers web sites. This system gives you access to many variables and you can use them on your web page.

For example, if you wanted to have a unique Title, Description, and Keywords for a page you could use the following code in the template for displaying products:

<title>!---SITENAME--- - !---DESC---</title>
<meta name="description" content="!---DESC--- - !---CURRENT_CAT_DESC---" />
<meta name="keywords" content="!---KEYWORDS---" />

In PDG, !---SITENAME--- is a variable that is replaced with the site name, such as ReddyOrNot.Com. !---DESC--- is the item's title, such as Fire Extinguisher Model 2BC10.

If a customer wants to do something a little differently, there are user defined variables that can be used in place of the standard ones. We used that technique with the Kayak Academy because they wanted longer descriptions.

As with any other page on your site, the text that describes the product should be well written with SEO in mind just as for any other page on your site. E-commerce packages normally have an area for detailed descriptions of a product. You don't have to be verbose but you do have to write wisely.

PDG and SEO

PDG Commerce has some nifty features for customizing the web page for each product. It's just not that simple to implement all of them. Rimini Software includes SEO optimization with each of our PDG projects. We will show you how to make changes within the PDG admin tool so you don't have to code XHTML.

Like many shopping carts, the URL PDG creates for each product can look really unfriendly. We have created custom URL re-write rules so your web address will be much easier to read.

Sample Searches

Some of our clients have done outstanding with search engine optimization. The Kayak Academy and Cedar Sign consistently rank in the top few Google results.

The Kayak Academy is known for being the best retailer for custom Kokatat dry suits. Search for custom drysuits and they will be one or two in the results. Out of all the Kayak schools in the country, you'll likely see them ranked 1 or 2 in most kayak related searches.

Cedar Sign Company has been making signs for over 40 years. If you do a Google search for cedar sign, they will be number one.

A lot goes into getting these rankings. Your time and effort are really important. It helps to have a company like Rimini Software setup the SEO infrastructure so your time and effort will be more productive.

"Old" School

"Old" School has two meanings here -

The age of a web address can have a big impact on how well a site ranks. If you have a well aged web address, you should be very careful about changing the URL. Changing names can be a big set back.

Before SEO became such a hot topic, a web site could do really well in page rankings by just having unique meta tags (Title, Description, Keywords). It is more competitive now. But a site that's been around for a while and has excellent content will rank highly even if all of the SEO parts are not in place. It could be vulnerable if another site puts more effort into ranking higher.