What search engines like
Many people regard search engine optimization (SEO) as a ‘black art’, but in fact, the basic principles are quite straightforward.
At one time, all you needed to do was to choose the key words you thought people might search for, add them and a good description of your web site to the pages’ meta tags and then submit the site to the numerous search engines.
These days it’s not quite so straightforward. The major search engines now place far more emphasis on the real content of web pages and their popularity. These factors are quite difficult to manipulate to your advantage without breaking the search engines’ guidelines.
To get a good search engine position you need:
- your targeted keywords and other relevant text in the body of your page
- other highly ranked relevant sites linked to yours
- your targeted keywords in your page title
- your targeted keywords in your domain name
- your targeted keywords in any image ‘alt’ tags
Targeted keywords in meta tags help with some search engines, but not, it seems, with Google.
Don’t use “graphical text”. Web designers love it but search engines cannot read it and hence it does not help your search engine position.
Search engines do not like:
- repeated keywords
- additional text in the same color as the page background, thus invisible to normal readers
- multiple web sites that contain the same content
Using such techniques may cause the search engines to believe that you are trying to manipulate your listing and they may remove your web site from their databases all together.
The search engines go to great efforts to give their highest rankings to the most relevant web pages for the search terms. If a web page is interesting to a human reader then, providing the page includes the targeted key words high up on the page, then the site will be “interesting” to the search engines.
Search engines are now smart enough not only to identify keywords on a web page, but also to determine whether the words are presented in logical fashion. Keep this in mind when writing your blog posts.
Of course, there is much more to search engine optimization; I will touch on some more specific techniques in future posts.
