Monday, March 2, 2009
Hide and Seek with Google
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a top priority for most businesses these days. There are approximately 3 zillion websites out there and your company needs to move up in the search results. Here are the basic things you can work on to begin to raise your page rank. Note that this is a process and you won't jump from #34,519 to #3 overnight.
Begin by working out exactly which keywords you want to be found by. Put yourself in the scenario of a potential customer who doesn't know much about your industry or company. What would they type in the search box? You may want to ask some of your actual cusomers how they found your site. Think about things like geography too. If your clients are mostly local, make sure that the name of your town is part of your keyword list. A good idea for retailers is to add the brand names you carry as well as the product category (for instance, use both "Whirlpool" and "oven"). The better you work this out now, the more potent your results will be.
Google looks at the HTML code and content of your pages and searches for keywords. Part of the page ranking system is how the words are used on the page. The first thing looked at are the URL and page title. Google gives a lot of weight to keywords that appear in those areas. 
If your URL is www.oven-store.com and the page title is "Ovens by Whirlpool, Kenmore and GE", you're going to get high results for the word "oven". A lot of businesses have the company as the URL already. If this is that case, focus on the the page title.
The next highest ranked area for a keyword is in headings, the <h1> HTML tag. These are the headlines on your site. Putting the right words in the headings jumps your page rank higher. Using the oven example again, a heading that reads "We sell top-brand ovens at great prices" is going to be rated higher than "Great prices and great service". Using subheads with the <h2> tag helps as well.
The search engine is then going to rank the rest of the content by the use of the keyword. Be careful not to artifically stuff your text with repeating words, as most search engines wil notice that and actually rank your page lower for cheating. This also makes for poor reading.
The previous paragraphs show the most important places for focus your SEO efforts. There are a number of other places that you can work in keywords that only have a small effect on your page rank. In the HTML of you page, using the <meta> tag for a page description and key word list is one. Using the <bold> tag helps a bit too. Images in HTML have an atrtibute called "alt" which provides a text description for the image. Using "alt" not only helps your SEO, but makes your website more accessible to those with disabilities.
Another part of the search formula is links. Site that have a lot of other sites using a particular keyword that link to it are considered more relevant and are ranked higher in the results. The process of building those backlinks to your site takes so time to do right. You can ask for reciprocal links with other sites, work with bloggers to have them link to your pages, and list your site in directories. If you are part of an online community, put your URL in your signature with a link. Avoid free-for-all link pages and "link farms" participating in those are considered cheating and at best, lower your page rank and at worst can get your site blacklisted from search engines. Publishing good, relevant content and a steady bit of elbow-grease in getting the word out naturally will go a long way.
