Here I am again with the promised continuation of the “Earn It!” section of web marketing basics. I’ve been in sunny Spain since I wrote the last piece and, somehow, things don’t seem to get done quite as quickly over here!!
As previously mentioned, the theory of good website optimisation is simply to provide the search engines, especially Google, with what they say they want - namely relevant, quality, up to date content. You also need to ensure the search spiders (robots) know what your webpages are all about so they can index and rank them effectively. Let’s take these three areas one at a time….
Relevance
Relevant means being “on topic” with the search terms used by people searching for information. Search spiders will index your pages according to the words and phrases you use in your webpages and in the meta tags within those pages. These “keyphrases” will then be matched with search phrases typed into the search engine by people looking for information.
So if someone is looking for information on “digital cameras” and you have a website focussed on all aspects of digital cameras and fully “optimised” for the term “digital cameras”, then your website will be considered relevant to that term by the search engines.
By “optimised” we mean that key areas of both the text and headers of your webpage contain the term “digital cameras”. The text area is that part of the page visible to the viewer, the header area is invisible to the viewer but contains important information for the search spiders.
Page Text
Within the text area key points for inclusion of your key phrase are:
- Headline (indicated in the html code as H1 Tag)
- Sub Headline (often H2 Tag)
- Paragraph headings (H2 or H3 or Bold Tags)
- Any emphasised text (bold, italic, underscore)
- Text associated with graphics (Alt Tags)
- Text within the first two or three paragraphs of a page
- Any text within navigation or other links (anchor text)
Page Header
Within the header area key points for keyphrase inclusion are:
- Title Tag (classisfies the topic of your page - very important)
- Description Tag (reinforces the classification of the page)
- Less important but sometimes relevant is the Keyword Tag
Both Title Tag and Description are also used in the results pages of the search engines.
Also consider incorporating your keyphrase into your page filename and even your website domain name.
The more pages you have relevant to the topic the better “score” your website will get.
The problem with this example is that there may be hundreds or even thousands of websites optimised for such a generic search term as “digital cameras”. You can get around this by further optimising for more specific key phrases such as “Sony digital cameras” or a specific model of Sony digital camera.
A well optimised website for the above example (digital cameras) would optimise the domain name and home page for the generic search term “digital cameras”, but would then have a separate section for each manufacturer optimsed for that manufacturer’s digital cameras. Within each section there would be a page for each individual model specifically optimised for that model of camera. The website would also have pages covering things such as:
- Hints and tips for best results
- Digital Camera Accessories
- Possibly a competition page for visitors to upload their photos
- A blog about photography with digital cameras
Such a site would score very well for relevance. It will also score well for quality in terms of content. However, quality (in the eyes of search engines) is also measured by the number and quality of incoming links, i.e. links from other websites. It’s getting late so I will cover the subject of links and quality in my next article.