The Voice of Pinpoint

So you’ve heard the term “SEO”, and you vaguely understand what it means – Search Engine Optimization. The name pretty much explains itself – SEO is a practice of optimizing a website (really a set of web pages) for optimum search engine rankings. When someone enters “North Texas Web Design” into Google, we would like appear somewhere on the first page (ideally as the first result). Pages can be optimized for any number of keyword phrases, though realistically you should really focus in on just a handful.

If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.

A long time ago, SEO was basically full of black hat tactics – including stuffing keywords all over your web page, stuffing your keywords META tag, buying loads of unrelated links to your website, etc. As Google has grown, so has their algorithm for ranking pages. Google’s algorithm is much more intelligent now. Now, if Google determines you to be keyword stuffing or buying unrelated links, you are penalized. In the case of JC Penney a few months ago, you will find your pages are about a hundred pages back from where the used to be. So now that we’ve identified what not to do… it’s time to get into the nitty gritty.

Here are some good approaches to SEO that will help you achieve higher rankings:

• Create accurate and unique title tags for each of your pages with relevant keywords – make sure each title tag is 66 or less characters in length, because that’s the maximum size that will be read by Google
• Create a description meta tag for each page on your site. The description tag is usually used by Google and displayed under your title tag in search results. Words in the description field are bolded when found within the user’s search query.
• Take link structure into consideration when designing a website. Google can read keywords from your URL, so a page like this: http://www.domain.com/view/product.php?id=345345 is very hard to derive any useful information from. You should try something like this: http://www.domain.com/product/baseball-cards. Often times, especially when creating dynamic websites, it is difficult to create descriptive pages. There is a great solution though, and it’s called URL Rewriting. URL Rewriting is done with mod_rewrite in Linux servers. You are able to set rewrite rules so that you can link to a pretty URL with great keywords and have the content of a dynamic URL displayed. Our company uses URL Rewriting for almost every dynamic project.
• Make sure your website is easy to navigate. This helps search engine crawlers more easily index your web pages.
• Create an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a roadmap of all the pages on your website. You can add one to Google’s webmaster tools. Within the sitemap you can do things like specify which pages are more important and outline the structure of your website.
• Use breadcrumbs on every page except your home page. Breadcrumbs help users understand where they are within your site structure and help them navigate to previous sections. Breadcrumbs look something like this: Home > Products > Baseball Cards > Nolan Ryan. Do not make the current page they are viewing a link.
• Use relevant keywords within your anchor text and in the title attribute of your links. Keywords can be associated with the link destination in this way.
• Create a useful 404 page. 404 pages are shown when a user attempts to access a non-existent website. Creating a custom 404 page can greatly enhance the user experience. You can provide links on your 404 page to popular pages and add to the user experience.
• Create interesting, unique content on your website. Users understand good content when they see it and are more likely to share it with others within social media or their own blogs. Word of mouth buzz and personal referrals are paramount.
• Optimize images by using the ALT tag – which helps Google and other search engines understand what the image is about. ALT tags are also used by the visually disabled to better understand the contents of an image.
• Use heading tags to emphasize important text.
• Effectively use robots.txt. This file, stored on your server, enables you to tell Google which sites to index and which sites not to index. You obviously don’t want your admin panel or wordpress login page to be indexed, so tell Google this.
• Use rel=”nofollow” when you want to link to a third party site but don’t want Google’s crawler to follow it or to send any of your pagerank to that page.
• Make use of free webmaster tools, like Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

By utilizing the techniques mentioned above, you can really improve your search engine rankings. However, the single most important factor in determining your search rank for various keywords is how well connected you are on the internet – or in other words, how many people link to you. Always pursue listings in business directories or other relevant portals. Creating good content on your website and blog also encourages others to link to your site.

Good luck SEO-ing!