Search Engine Optimization
Posted on December 18, 2005 | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
One of the most frequent client requests is "I want my site to be #1 in Google". While we'd all like our site to be #1, in reality it isn't that simple. Search Engine Optimization (SEO for the truly hip) has become a trendy buzzword for marketing executives who spout false promises of search engine glory. The field has grown to the point where there are literally hundreds of firms claiming to be able to increase your search engine presence for a mere several thousand dollars. There are others on the opposite side claiming that all you need is a few meta tags to make your site stand out in Google. So who's right? What factors really DO affect your search engine ranking? What can you, as a developer, do to ensure that your site is properly optimized for Google, Yahoo!, and all the rest?
SEOmoz has compiled two of the best articles on search engine influencers that I've seen.
I encourage all developers to read those articles in depth but for the truly lazy, here're 5 quick tips for better SEO. In no particular order...
- Title tags - Every page on your site should have a unique title tag which gives a succinct description of the page. These should NOT be used to simulate breadcrumb trials.
BAD - MySite.com : Products : Gizmos : Cool Widget : Details
BETTER - Cool Widget Product Details | MySite.com - Standards based semantic markup - This should go without saying for web development but it does affect your search engine rankings. Encoding descriptive titles with <h1...h7> tags will help search engines in picking out your keywords.
- Avoid using &id= in your dynamic pages - I'd done this for years until I found out that Google doesn't index pages that use &id= in the querystring. See Google's Webmaster Guidelines for more.
- Link text - make the clickable portion of your links descriptive.
BAD - For information on widget #5, click here.
BETTER - More information on widget #5. - Ethics - Don't overload your page with keywords. Don't use hidden text to load your site with keywords. Don't try to create special pages just for search engines. If it seems like a questionable practice, it probably is.
For SEO I've been using h1-h5 and li tags with background images for graphical headers and menus. Inside the h1-h5 and li tags I use spans setting the display to none in an external css. My hope is that search engines and screen readers can utilize the information and the user (assuming their browser supports background images) will see graphical headers. The downside is that using a span inside an h1 is not necessarily good practice, and purists will agree it's a hack.