subject: Seo The Basics [print this page] SEO is important for any successful websiteSEO is important for any successful website. SEO covers a whole range of techniques used to get your website more traffic via search engines. SEO is all about maximizing the readability of your website by humans or computers.
Good SEO can give you an added boost over your competitors. If youve never thought about SEO then maybe this could be the missing piece for your website.
Right enough waffle, lets get down to some of the basics.
Why use SEO
SEO has grown over years with the popularity of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and recently Bing.
In order to fully understand SEO and the important role it plays in Websites first you should be aware of HTML the Basics.
Search Engines like google have big computers that crawl the Internet daily, looking for new or updated websites. The Robots surf the Internet in much the same way as we do. However they dont understand websites like humans do, they cannot see the colors or layout of a final page. Instead these robots just see your website as special text, HTML. The HTML describes your website completely, and the robots look at this text to try to gauge all sort of factors about your website, these may include;
what your website is about. the content of the website, the text and images.
structure of your website, which links go where, which pages relate to other pages.
the position of key elements of your page.
many many more, google keep their tests a firm secret but recent experts believe it to be in the 200 test per page.
From all this information, ranks your website along with billions of others ad gives them a score, this used to be between 0 and 10 and described Page Rank. The higher the rank the higher your website would rank in search results. The search engine can better serve its Users to give them relivant websites, also stopping bad websites from getting traffic.
Simple SEO
Title tags
All HTML pages have a tag, this is placed in the of your HTML page. This is one of the first things a Search Engine will check. This is as implied the Title of your Page. Good Selection of Text to include in your title tag can be crucial. Be aware that each web page should have a different title, one that describes the current page you are on.
Title tags appear in the Tabs of a browser window, and also will be used by google as the main link for that page in search results.
Beware that Google in particular penalize your ranking if your title tags are duplicated across a site, longer than 255 characters or are spammy (please see Black Hat techniques below)
Meta Tags
Meta tags are used for lots of things on websites but one of there more basic is sometimes overlooked.
The 2 main meta tags for SEO are the Description and Keywords tag, they look like this.
The aim of these meta tags is to give the search engines more structured information about this page, ill go through each in tern.
The Description Tag is used as a brief summary of this page. usually containing the key important information about this page. Google uses this as the small black text that displays under a search results Main Link, this text is important, its the first impression a client has about your website.
The Keywords tag is similar, its used to tell the search engine the a group of keywords that you think best describe this web page. Keywords tag shouldnt be longer than 255 characters and every keyword should appear on this page. The keywords tag has been abused by some websites by cramming in popular search terms, have a look at Black Hat SEO below. Many websites have opted to stop relying on the keywords tag as a useful way of gauging a website for 2 reasons, the aforementioned abuse and the better results generated by reading the whole web page content.
Fonts
This can be a tricky one, and can be overlooked. Its an example of form over function. Lets consider the following title on web page
Overlooking the fact its not very descriptive, the main problem is that its an image, click and hold with you mouse and you should be able to grab the image around without selecting the text. There are a few issues with doing any sort of typography like this;
Its in accesable. Blind people oftern use the internet and burying importnant text in images makes it almost impossible for that person to use your site.
Partially sighted people who might have difficulty reading your font size cant use the build in commands of the browser to read your website at a comfortable size that suits them.
The text is not selectable so if your users are meant to copy and paste your content for another time, important information is lost in the image.
Search Engine Robots do not scan images for text in order to rank your site. This can be a huge impact on Page Ranking.
Modern browsers now support web fonts using the @font-face css rule, this basically eliminates the need for embedded text in images. If images cant be avoided its highly recommended you use alt=" and title=" attributes to help describe the image to Search Engines.
Content
Content is the key to any good website. Content is the reason someone comes to your website, weather its your latest blog post, latest product or service, the content of your website is key in generating traffic. Search Engine Robots are very cleaver and process the content of your site. Weirdly Google does kind of know what makes a good website, their robots can tell if your just stealing other peoples content of if your not updating your site. Content on your site should always be a main priority. Websites shouldnt be aloud to go stale and the content fall out of date, modern CMS can help manage your website to bring your Customers exactly what they are looking for.
Bad SEO or Black Hat SEO
Not all SEO is good SEO. SEO is a big business and rightly so, however it is open for abuse.
SEO falls roughly two categories, White Hat and Black Hat
White Hat is perfectly fine and allowed, this kind of SEO if the general run of the mill stuff discussed above along with more advanced techniques, white hat is usually anything that isnt trying to exploit knowledge of Search Engines to maximise traffic and rankings. Always think if what SEO your doing is fair and above board. You can be heavily punished by Google for exploiting their systems.
