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Break Through the Frustration of
Optimization
"I am an artist," the man proudly
proclaimed. "I don't care," the critic proudly responded. "The frame is too
large, the colors are dark and it will not match my furniture," the critic
further explained.
Many times web developers experience a
similar scorn but not always from humans. A site has been designed with an
interface that pops with beautiful GIFs and JPEGs, dazzles with Flash and
functions like a charm with JavaScript. The search engines do not care. The
content, the keywords and the tags do not correspond with the criteria of the
search engines. Therefore, you are ignored.
It is a struggle between art and science
that frustrates many. The responsibilities of web developing -- the art -- clash
with the role of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) -- the science. That is
why some companies and development firms are designating web developer and
optimizer as two distinctive jobs.
Yet many smaller companies and shops
still have the web developer fulfilling both roles. The problem is that
optimization is becoming challenging and competitive. So here is some
information to help start the optimization before, after or during the
developing.
Content
It's all about the text.
Remember that optimization is all about
the text. Search engines are text driven but there are still some basic HTML
tags to keep in mind (i.e., h1, h2, meta tags, title tag). SEO helps improve
search engine results but does not guarantee top ratings.
Patience and realistic goals will keep
the frustrations low. Search engines have to crawl a site to determine what a
site is about. This takes time, usually about a month, before crawls and
indexing are completed by the various search engine spiders.
Take time to think (a lot) about the
purpose of the website. Write down a lot of stuff in a word processing program
even if it sounds silly at first. Then edit what you wrote. Edit some more, get
some feedback and then start working on the keywords and keyphrases that
identify the unique quality of your website.
Keywords and Keyphrases
Keywords used to be easy. Those days are
gone. Keywords are highly competitive. Using two-word or three-word, maybe even
four-word, phrases makes optimization less frustrating. A keyword phrase (keyphrase)
helps identify the uniqueness of a website.
The keyword "game" will generate about 1
billion(!) results. The keyphrase "card game" will generate about 50 million
results. That is a difference of approximately 950 million. The keyphrase "magic
card game" will generate about four-million results. Time will need to be spent
finding unique keyphrases but the benefits of narrowing the results, with
multi-word phrases, provides a better chance of being noticed.
Keyword Density
The density formula is D = WC/KC (D =
density; WC = word count; KC = keyword count)
For major keywords target 3-7% density
For minor keywords target 1-2% density
Keyword density measures how relevant
keywords are in a page. The formula density = word count divided by keyword
count will provide a general idea of the density percentage. For major keywords
try to keep the density between three and seven percent. For minor keywords keep
density between one and two percent. Try to optimize between five to ten
keywords per web page.
Avoid the unethical practice of keyword
stuffing. You will be penalized and possibly banned from the search engines
which is worse than doing no optimization at all. Keyword stuffing uses various
techniques but it is basically stuffing a page and/or meta tag with several
occurrences of a keyword or keyphrase.
Keyword stuffing will result in being
banned from the search engines.
Meta Tags
The meta tags are important although
some will disagree. Meta tags have fallen out of favor because these tags used
to be the magic solution to optimization. Not anymore. Keywords and content are
more beneficial in getting a web site in top rankings. However, meta tags are
still important. Meta tags are a part of the HTML and are used by most search
engines to find a description of your website.
Therefore, no question about it, use the
meta tags for description and keywords. Place these meta tags below the title
tag on your page.
<title>~</title>
<meta name ="description" content="~" />
<meta name="keywords" content="~" />
The keyword meta tag helps you keep
track of the keywords and having these meta tags give a small boost to search
engine ranking. While it is true that meta tags do not perform the magic they
once did it is better to have the tags than to have none. Think of meta tags
like vitamins. Vitamins are not necessary for being healthy but vitamins do
provide a healthy boost.
Title Tag
The title tag should be unique for every
page because every page will or should have different information regarding your
website. Therefore, some pages will have some but not all of your total keyword
list. For example, let's say that your web site provides information about card
games; one page has data about magic card games and another discusses bridge
card games.
The title tag of the page with
information about magic card games could have a title like Magic Card Games
available at ourwebsite.com. The bridge card games page would likely have a
title of Bridge Card Games at ourwebsite.com.
The name of pages should also have
keywords like magic_card_games.htm or bridge_card_games.htm.
Developing websites is fun. Optimization
can be a chore. Yet by focusing on content, keywords and tags you have a good
start to decreasing the frustration of optimization. Granted there is more to
optimization than the items addressed in this article but these are the items
that can be and should be tackled first. |
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