Search engine optimization
The goal: To help users interested in your topic to find your site when using a search engine.
The background: Search engines, particularly Google, don’t know what your site is about, and never will. All they can do is try to match their user’s search phrase against all the text on all possible sites, and try to figure out which pages are likely to have useful information about that search phrase.
So Google examines your page to see where that search phrase occurs, and ranks you higher if the phrase is:
- In the ‘title’ field at the top of the browser window.
- In the page headline.
- Used prominently and often, but not too often, in the text of the page.
- In the “description” field (often displayed as part of the search results on Google).
- In the “keywords” field (not shown to users, but sometimes read by search engines).
At the same time, Google relies on all the humans out there, who have linked their pages to your page, to provide clues to what your page is all about. It looks for the search phrase and ranks you higher if:
- Lots of sites link to yours.
- Lots of sites that contain the search phrase link to yours.
- The text of the link itself (the blue underlined words) exactly matches the search phrase.
What to do internally to improve your ranking:
- Pick a few likely search phrases that you would like to attract.
- Make sure these words are in all the “metadata” fields (title, description, keywords).
- Make sure they’re used in headlines and body text (instead of synonyms or different phrases).
- Give each page its own set of metadata that repeats terms from its text and headline.
- When linking internally, use the underline text to name the topic of the target page.
External steps you can take:
- Put links to your site, and important pages, in your external communications.
- Encourage partners, collaborators, associations to add links. Provide suggested link text.
- Support use of community bookmarks (Digg, del.icio.us etc.)
- Add a page about yourself in an appropriate place in Wikipedia.
Contact me anytime: David Ansley Consulting