The Truth About SEO

Over the past decade, the internet has become the main source of information for just about anything. If you need to find details about a product, pricing for services or contact information for a business, you will likely find it somewhere on the web. Chances are you will be using a search engine to do it. Fifteen years ago, I would be surprised to find more than a handful of people that even knew what a search engine was. Now, they've not only become widespread, the word Google is actually been recognized as part of the English language.

With so much riding on search engines, it's no surprise that search engine optimization (SEO) has become a critical part of most websites. A web site's search engine visibility can make or break a company in a matter of months. This article will outline some of the myths and facts about SEO that may save your company a lot of money and even more headaches.

Looking Behind the Curtain

Before we take a look at some of the details of SEO, it's worth examining how search engines work. A search engine generally consists of 2 parts: web spiders and a search page. The web spiders are a series of programs that examine web pages and store information about those pages in a database. The search page allows you to search for pages within this database. Pages within the database receive a page rank for specific terms, which determines which order they appear in on the search results. The goal of SEO is to boost this page rank so that your site appears earlier in the results.

With this basic explanation of search engines in mind, let's take a look some of the details.

Search Engine Friendly Content

The first step to improving SEO for your site is to examine the content and structure of your site.  When a web spider reads the content in your site, it's looking for unique phrases that identify your site and creating rough estimates of the importance of these phrases. Phrases that appear in headings, links and other prominent areas are considered more important than phrases occurring in body text or hidden in the footer. Placing important content prominently on the page is more important that having specific keyword phrases repeated many times.

It's also important that your content is structured in a way that web spiders can read. The easiest way to do this is to make sure that your site is adhering to web standards. These standards were put in place by industry professionals and provide a guideline of how web sites should be built. Sites adhering to these standards are easier for spiders to accurately read.

Getting the Word Out

One of the best ways to improve your page ranking is to get other sites to link to yours. Spiders use links not only to find your site, but also as a critical metric in ranking your site. Incoming links from highly ranked sites improves your site's ranking. In addition to examining page ranks, the spiders also look at the text in the link. A link that says "Check out our web design studio" is much better than "click here for more info". Having the phrase "click here" associated with your site won't help much.

When trying to get some links out there, there are good ways and bad ways. There are many sites that will sell links and provide guarantees about page rank improvements. Most search engines ignore purchased links and some may even reduce your rank. You can find plenty of good ways to improve your rank through links. Having your site or products listed on relevant industry or professional associations helps. Suggesting your URL at directory sites like dmoz.org will help. Finally, posting comments on forums, blogs and news stories relevant to your site will help.

Things That Don't Help Your SEO

There are a wide variety of techniques that people use to improve SEO that don't provide any boost to rankings. While some of these things are a good idea for reasons other than SEO, here are a list of things that won't help your site ranking:

• Purchasing Google AdWords - While purchasing AdWords from Google might make your site more visible in the advertising areas, the actual results are not affected by AdWords.
• Updating Content Daily - Updating content will encourage spiders to read content on your site more frequently, but it won't boost your page rank unless the content is relevant. Updating content is still a good idea, because it brings people back to your site.
• Meta Keywords - Meta keywords used to be a critical part of defining your site, but now most search engine spiders ignore them due to rampant abuse. It's still a good idea to put a few basic keywords in your meta information, but don't expect massive jumps in page rank.

Things That Will Help

While there are lots of things that don't improve your sites' search engine ranking; there are some more techniques that will help boost your site's SEO score.  Here are a few that might help your site.

• Optimize Internal Pages - Since internal pages rarely show up in search results, many companies don't optimize them. However, most search engines monitor these interior pages and use them to boost the ranking of the site's home page.
• Identify Images - Images and various other elements provide the ability to identify them. For example, Images have an alt property that allows you to define what's in the image. These identifiers are picked up by search engines and are especially useful for sites with multi-media content.
• Search for Your Own Business - Sometimes a competitor might purchase an AdWord with your company's name in it. Google doesn't allow this and a quick call to their customer support will usually get the AdWord taken down. While these AdWords won't affect your rank, they may draw away search leads.

Hopefully these tips will help you make your site more findable. They should provide a good foundation to get started and some insight into what's really going on with search engines.

Ian Muir is a web designer and developer specializing in the integration of graphic design, user experience and innovative programming. He currently works for CustomScoop in Concord, NH and provides design and development consultation through Sunder Media.

Ian writes for SitePoint on topics related to ASP.NET and design and won the 2007 MIX design contest for Microsoft's MIX conference. He has also been working to develop the technology community in Northern New England by organizing BarCampManchester and working on various projects with the Amoskeag Business Incubator.

QUESTION: Does having a presence on social networking sites, such as FaceBook or LinkedIn, provide a significant impact on SEO?

ANSWER: Some social networking tools can provide a slight boost to SEO, but it's rarely significant. The greater benefit of social networking sites is that it raises the profile of your site and increases the chances that others will link to you. They can also be a useful way to connect with a new audience.

One social networking site that you can use to boost SEO is Digg.com. Digg is a site that provides a way for users to post interesting links which other users can vote on. Having a blog post or news article ranked highly on Digg can create a huge boost in traffic and SEO.

QUESTION: I read your article through ABI. We are in the process of redesigning our website. Our present design consists entirely of static pages. The new design will integrate a shopping cart that generates pages dynamically. In reviewing shopping cart options, they all say "search engine friendly" or "best search engine optimization". First, what is the impact of dynamically generated pages on search engines and ranking, and second, what should I look for in a shopping cart product or do that will provide high ranking with dynamically generated pages?  We have very good rankings now with our static pages and I am afraid we are going to loose our rankings when we switch over to dynamic pages and new page urls.

ANSWER: In general, search engines don't differentiate between static and dynamic pages. There are some things to look for in an e-commerce solution that will help.

Make sure that the page title (the title bar at the top of the browser) and the url contain readable text. Some e-commerce solutions create urls using id (for example product.asp?id=10) the better solutions use names (organic_bed_spread.asp).

Also, make sure that your items contain generic words in the title as well as a model or item number. People are unlikely to search for 'Natural Check 230 Thread Count' but they are very like to search for 'Organic Crib Sheets'. It looks like your current page titles are actually pretty good, using phrases like ' Certified Organic Cotton Towels' are great.

QUESTION: I am interested in creating a web page. If I commission someone to do this for me, do I "own" the http://www.blank.com/? I have a great idea for the internet which requires a unique www.address. However, I hesitate to give the information to anyone for fear that I will not "own" it. Am I making any sense? Thanks for your help.

ANSWER: The ownerships varies a bit depending on the site. For most sites that are primarily based on articles, events or other informational items, the developer owns the code of the site, but you would own all rights to the domain name and the content. It's kind of like using Microsoft Word. You aren't allowed to sell copies of the software, but you can sell anything you make with it.

One thing to keep in mind is that your idea for a website would be protected in the same way as any other intellectual property. If you buy a domain, such as http://www.myidea.com/, you will have established a time when you came up with the idea and a developer would be unlikely to try and steal it.

Finally, if you're really concerned, you could have a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) drafted and have any potential developers sign it. Reputable developers would have no problem signing an NDA; they are not uncommon in the industry.

If you need some recommendations for a developer to help you, let me know and I would be happy to help you find a good option.

QUESTION: One of your tips that won't necessarily help your SEO, but is a good idea is updating content. Upon updating content that can be accessed on one's website, would it also be beneficial to archive previous content since those topics may be searched?

ANSWER: It depends on the nature of the content. If it's no longer relevant (announcements for events that have passed, obsolete support info, etc) then there is no need to archive it. If the content is a news article, blog post or some other item that is still relevant it should remain available on the site. In most cases these items will be on their own page, so as long as that page remains accessible you should be fine.

QUESTION: You stated, "Most search engines ignore purchased links and some may even reduce your rank".  How are search engines able to reduce a rank based on a purchase? If the words searched for are a better match on the site that made the purchase than another site, then it seems as if the search engine is cheating the searcher.

ANSWER: Search engines base page ranking on "organic" results. That is, they base ranking on trends that arise from how people search. Many sites that sell links to boost search engine rankings are specifically designed to abuse these trends to artificially raise a sites ranking. They are essentially designed to stuff the page rank spiders with links to make a site look more relevant than it would otherwise appear.

Google and other search engine vendors actively seek out and block these sites. In addition, Google will take corrective action against sites using these services to counteract any positive rank they may have artificially gained. Unfortunately, some legitimate sites are adversely affected, but most search vendors have adopted a guilt by association position. Here's a quick article about the topic if you're interested http://www.southwestecommerce.com/library/linkfarms.htm.

QUESTION:  You stated, "There are many sites that will sell links and provide guarantees about page rank improvements".   If a company wants its link to be ranked higher, then wouldn't it make a payment to the search engine company (which then the search engine company would be obligated to raise the ranking)? If not, then who is that company purchasing its "higher ranking" from?

ANSWER:  None of the major search engine providers (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask) allow companies to purchase higher rankings. Part of the reason Google became so popular is because their search results were based solely on "organic" results rather than sponsored results.

The sites guaranteeing higher rank are generally link farms or other systems design to trick the search engine into ranking the site higher. These sites don't have the ability to directly raise your rank, but they generally provide a temporary boost in ranking. Most search engine vendors are tracking down these sites and actively blocking them.

If you really want to boost your rank, Google actually provides some free advice and tools at http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/