SEO Basics

© SMC 2008

SEO Basics

© SMC 2008

Search Engine Optimisation

• SEO is the art of getting your site to appear amongst the top results when people enter certain keywords into a search engine.

• SEO is a huge field providing a living to many experts and many purveyors of snake-oil.

• However simple good site design and IA practices will get you to first base.

© SMC 2008

© SMC 2008

The html <title> tag is consistently rated as the #1 factor in search engine rankings

If you do only one thing to improve SEO, meaningful titles should be it.

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Having a domain name which relates to your main subject is good.

Having keywords appended to the URL is not a huge factor, but some engines such as Yahoo like this.

Note how this URL suggests a clear logical structure: site -> articles -> particular article. Simple clear site structures are good for users and robots.

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Meta tags were too easy to abuse are now largely ignored as ranking factors.

But the description tag is important as it can supply the text displayed in a listing.

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The html source of this document itself is very clean. All the style and script is abstracted out, the code is lean, you quickly get to the content:

This is good practice for all sorts of reasons, including legibility to search robots.

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The nav links are simple hrefs, which robots can follow. They cannot follow javascript links, or use site search forms. All important pages need to be accessible by browsing links.

H1

H2

Search engines give more weight to keywords in proper headings, this is good usability practice anyway.

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Keyword use in the actual content is obviously very important… but difficult to manipulate outside of pure marketing contexts. You aren’t going to rewrite a scientific paper or newspaper editorial to be google-friendly.

The main thing is to write good content!

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Good internal links help search engines make sense of your site and boost rankings

Quality and relevance of external links is also important.

Give links proper text and not ‘click here’.

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Now it is about marketing. The main thing Google looks for is how many people link to your site, and the quality and relevance of the referring sites

Links from a highly trusted site like the BBC are great. Links from dodgylinkfarm.com are not, and may even harm your ranking

The better, more unique and more authoritative your content is, the more likely it is good sites will link to it.

Beyond First Base…

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To get started you could consider using PR services to get into news sites..

Beyond First Base…

..Or buying keyword advertising..

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Beyond First Base…

… Or get creative!

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Further Reading

• http://searchenginewatch.com

• http://www.seomoz.org/

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/06/search-engines-internet