the art of lying just beyond the edge of respectability

Search Engine Optimization Basics (Part 1)

Posted January 30, 2010 in Web Design | Comments 0

Starting at the top

This part one of my series on basic SEO. The following information is meant to help educate junior web developers and other website owners who are interested in looking for a place to begin with organic SEO. The concept of search engine optimization is a generally nebulous area with loads of information ranging from the sublime to the obscure. For this search engine optimization primer, we are going to start at the literal top of your html document in the the meta section.

Step 1 Robots.txt

Create a robots.txt file. The robots file is a simple text file that is uploaded to your website, and serves as a way of indicating to search engines what content you do and don't want indexed on your website. A standard call to a robots.txt file might look like this:

The "name" portion of the robots meta tag indicates to search engine spiders/robots that a file is present. The "content" segement of the robots meta tag allows you to specify parameters (separated by commas) for your robots.txt handling. In my example, I have included the following parameters

follow - an arbitrary parameter which invites spiders to index your site

noodp - ignore "Open Directory Profile" listing

noydir - ignore "Yahoo Directory" listing

Some more on the "noodp" & "noydir" parameters: Sometimes a search engine will take your meta description information from a preexisting location (like the Open Directory Profile or Yahoo's Directory - assuming your site is already listed there). To indicate that you wish to serve up the meta description specifically from your site and not these directories, include the previous values in your robots meta tag contents.

Building the robots.txt file

Creating a robots.txt file is simple. My standard file looks like this:

"User agent:*" tells all search engine spiders to visit and read the robots.txt file. The "User agent" can be targeted to specific crawlers/spiders but granting all spiders access with the asterisk declaration is generally a fine practice. Reasons for including specific robots might be to exploit expiration features. For instance the GoogleBot respects expiration dates, while other robots do not.

The "Disallow:" statements inform the crawler not to index the directories that follow the colon. Please note that this won't hide your content from search engines and is not a security measure. It simply informs web crawlers that you don't want them indexed.

The directories I have disallowed in my example file may not reflect your own website directory structure - so make certain you identify your own website folder structure correctly in your robots.txt file.

Using a simple text editor (Text Edit for Mac, or Notepad for Windows) is an easy way of writing your robots.txt file. After you have typed your robots file, save the document with the "txt" extension, and save it to the root of your website directory. A great resource for making certain your robots.txt file is valid can be found online for free at this website: Robots.txt Syntax Checker. Another online resource which offers automatic generation of robots.txt files can be sourced at: Mcanerin Robots.txt Generator, although I still prefer to write my own.

Step 2 - The Meta Description Tag

The meta description provides a summary of the information stored on your webpage. It is believed that advances in search engine algorithms have reduced the significance a meta description tag has on your website’s overall page rank, however care should still be taken to create meta descriptions for all of your pages.

But if my meta tags may not directly impact my SEO rank, why should I care?
The meta description tag is how engines like Google and Yahoo describe an indexed page on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Users visiting search engines will use the descriptions they see listed on the SERP’s as indicators of search relevance:

If your webpage is indexed but contains no meta, it won’t impress any relevancy on users. Secondly, meta provides context which is a huge factor in your overall page rank. Your overall website rank is heavily impacted by the cumulative effect of your optimization efforts.

What exactly does that mean for me?
This means that if both your website content and your meta description contains useful and relevant information – all of the data will work in concert and improve your website rank in search engines. Solid meta descriptions, robot tags and other topics (like keyword density analysis) alone, aren’t enough to optimize your website.

They aren’t enough? That sucks. Why bother then?
Exactly. That is why many sites aren’t optimized well, because it isn’t a simple procedure. And since most websites aren’t identical – there isn’t a silver bullet SEO method that works across all websites either.

Writing a Meta Description

When you are creating a meta description tag for your web page, keep the character limit under 150 words. 150 is generally the point of truncation for SERPS (a 175 character limit has been used as a meter as well). Any extra characters exceeding the character limit will be cleaved off of your text and you messaging could become lost or obscured.

Having a character limit is actually helpful, because it forces you to craft targeted and relevant copy in short amount of space. Remember to avoid stuffing your meta description copy with keywords. Instead use the tag to accurately represent the contents of your webpage, because you are primarily targeting humans and not machines with your meta tags. Lastly, be sure to create unique meta descriptions for each internal page of your website. Your homepage will not be the only page (hopefully!) to get indexed by search engines. By crafting unique meta descriptions for all internal pages, you can be confident that users will have an accurate idea of what your website is all about when any of it's pages appear in a search result.

Step 4 -Meta Keywords Tag?

The meta keywords tag has been considered by many in the SEO community to a be depreciated tag. The effects of this tag on your website rank or indexing are debatable. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be included. The presence of a keywords tag doesn't show any evidence of reducing your search engine score and if it should return to prominence in the future, you can consider yourself covered by including it.

Writing a Keywords Tag

Group keywords and terms that you want captured together within the commas of the content portion of your keywords tag.

Why I like the Keywords Tag

I like to leverage the keywords tag as a guide for what content within my website pages I am trying to optimize. I will typically ask a client to provide a list of 20 keywords that they feel are relevant to their business. It might not sound like very many, but it is harder to generate a list of 20 relevant keywords than it sounds. Once I have that list, I will immediately root out keywords I know won't garner the client any search relevance. This is because I deem certain keywords far too generic, or because I feel they are already too heavily targeted online. You can get an idea of how much comptetion a keyword has by researching it for free using the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Part 2

Part 2 is coming shortly...

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