Today I received an e-mail from someone that found my horribly incomplete website through Twitter (which is pretty cool! (…that they found me, not that I haven’t finished this site yet…)) that was looking for help with SEO on their website. I wrote back and explained my take on SEO, which is basically “make a website correctly and have good content” rather than trying to trick your way into a high rank. After I sent the e-mail I figured I’d post some of it on here for posterity.
My Take on SEO
Most people think of SEO as a dark art where you need to have specific insights to the inner workings of the search engines to help your page rank (which I suppose would help), but there are also a lot of fairly simple best practices you can employ to help your page rank, which I discuss below.
That being said, when it comes to SEO I simply use these (and other) best practices when developing websites because if you try to be sneaky about getting a high page rank using questionable “techniques” your website could very well be removed from the search results, which would be a terrible thing.
Bear in mind that I am not an SEO expert (nor do I care to be). (For that matter, most “SEO Experts” are also not “SEO Experts” either)
When I think of SEO I think of:
- Syntactically correct markup
- Having a sitemap
- Fast page loading time
- Keyword rich URLs
- Keyword rich, quality content (this is the most important)
Syntactically correct markup just means that all of the code written to display your page is mistake-free. You can check to see if the markup is correct or not by visiting http://validator.w3.org and entering your URL.
Sitemaps allow search engines to index your website easier, and as an added bonus your visitors can also use it to navigate your site if they want.
Page loading time is beginning to affect search engine ranking because it indicates the quality of a website. When comparing two websites it would seem that a faster, well built website would have more legitimacy than a slower, poorly constructed website because it was likely made by a professional. There are a number of ways that you can decrease your page loading time, but a great first step is to have syntactically correct markup.
Keyword rich URLs provide a description of what’s on a specific page with only a quick glance. For example, it’s pretty obvious what you’ll find at a URL that reads http://www.mywebsite.com/login or http://www.mywebsite.com/family-photos whereas you would have no idea what you would find at a more cryptic URL like http://www.mywebsite.com/page58gh.php
Keyword rich, quality content (emphasis on quality) is really the most important thing for your website. In the old days people would game the system by putting a big block of text at the bottom of each page with hundreds of keywords so the search engines would pick them up. That “technique” hasn’t worked for quite some time now and it can actually hurt your page rank because it makes your site look spammy. Quality content about a subject will win out over the more subtle SEO techniques in many cases and it will strengthen your online brand at the same time. This is why a lot of online retailers (like http://www.woot.com for example) have blogs in addition to their online store fronts.
And there’s other stuff too, like putting your “script” tags last in your page’s head section since they prevent concurrent loading, but for the purposes of the e-mail I sent, I figured it wasn’t relevant.
