Making Your Web Site “Search Engine Friendly”
April Clark
CAS Marketing Consultant
CAS
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First, put on your ?search engine thinking cap!? The more your creative folks can ?think? like a search engine, the more successful your site will be. But strike a happy balance, don’t think so hard that your site becomes a spam victim.
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Understanding how a search engine works is the second step. Search engines look at your HTML code within your web pages and try to extract the content of your text. Then this page text goes into the search engine’s index ? which is a huge pool of Web site information ? accompanied by the page’s input and output links. When you enter your search criteria, this causes a search engine to look through its index and pull a list of all the Web pages that include your requested search. Then that list is judged mostly on the number, high rating and honesty of the links that point to each page. So if your web site/pages do not include common search words, then your university site will rarely if ever show up on search lists. In fact, the search engines probably won’t even index your pages! Once the matching pages are identified in the search, the list is ranked according to relevance. Relevance is determined on many, many criteria ? such as the number of times the keyword appears on your site and exactly where those keywords appear. HOWEVER… useless repeating of favorite keywords becomes spam software targets if you aren’t careful.
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Back to ?thinking like a search engine?? If you look at your existing web copy and you see that the first few paragraphs are much too wordy?. you need to change the copy. Also see if the titles for this page have your most important key words shown first (in some bad cases, they might be actually last!) A simple switching of the location of certain important search words for that page to the beginning, and the top of your page can really help to raise your ratings. This is putting to use the idea of keyword prominence and it works on both levels ? within a title tag as well as the wider view,
within the whole page.
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As you can see, it is a balancing act between honest placement
of keywords, and overkill which will trigger the spam penalty ? and decrease your relevance score.
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There is one more step you can use to encourage good behavior by the search engine ? you can put your keywords in heading tags to emphasize them. Again look at what you are putting together ? make sure the page structure is appealing, the content design includes the keywords inside heading tags, body copy and other tags ? THEN be sure your copy is interesting and drives your readers to excitement about your institution.
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Some guidelines for your writing:
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Have at least a couple hundred words of copy for each page ? all keyword focused. ?Include images and your copyright statement.
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When you are creating your links, be sure to include good keyword-rich text in your link text. Again, thinking like a search engine ? leave out instruction such as ?click here? or ?for more information,? because they mean absolutely nothing to a search engine, so are wasted. Instead choose words that are relevant to the page you are linking to.
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I mentioned the importance of links, the quality of links, and the connection of Google rankings to links. So, how do you build up your links? There are three basic supports that affect search engine optimization:
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content – which means basing your content on the keywords that are popular with your target audience
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architecture ? which means creating a site architecture that is conducive to high search rankings
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links ? which means you want to attract inbound links that point to your site
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These three supports work together to drive the desired traffic to your site. However, linking typically is the least utilized of the three, despite the fact that websites? search rankings are totally dependent on other Webmasters linking to your site. No links equals no traffic. It is definitely NOT a sheer numbers game ? the search engines use complicated algorithms to rank the value of a link. Important links such as msnbc.com count more than one from Heidi?s personal page.
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So how do you improve your score? First, like any marketing ploy, you need to measure it. The Google Toolbar is available for free. Go to http://toolbar.google.com. The Google toolbar installs into your Web browser ? either Internet Explorer or Firefox. Once installed the Google toolbar sports a small PageRank meter that indicates the importance of the page being currently viewed. Pretty cool!
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Put your cursor over the meter and a numerical score between 0 and 10 displays ? 0 being the worst and 10 being the best. All the scores are not equal ? it is much easier to move from 3 to 4, than the huge move from 7 to 8!! Be aware that there is a lag in reporting current scores, so Google Toolbar is an approximation, good for comparison. You can find other measuring tools like mozRank.
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Generally speaking, the best links are obtained by merit by offering noteworthy, valuable content on your web site. When Webmasters and bloggers find out you have content worthy of their notice ? they are moved to link. This is known as ?link bait.? Think of ?scoops,? humor, tools, downloads, how-tos, original research, event coverage,
quizzes, or other historic information. I think you can see how some of these ?link bait? topics can tie in with your institution?s web pages.
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Here are some things you can do to find and attract good links. Proactively solicit links carefully. Identify good targets by reviewing the links of competitive sites (like similar institutions to yours) and sites in your keyword market. What shows up when you search on your own target keywords? What do you see when you check their links? When you visit, suggest a link as a site visitor, or contact them representing yourself from your site. As in many pursuits, communicating accomplishes your goals. You can offer them some encouragement to include a link to your site by giving them constructive feedback on their site, as well as including your link. If you notice a problem with their site, tell them. The art of linking involves cooperation to become a win-win situation. It isn?t necessarily easy.
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The next hint is to ?Build Outside the Box.? Don?t go where everyone else goes. Think differently. Be creative. Involve your students in your brainstorming sessions. They know what links will attract potential new students to your site. Add those links. Don?t forget to be blogging ? blogs typically attract more links than e-commerce sites. Did you ever hear about blog carnivals? Find a directory at blogcarnival.org ? organized by topic.
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Blog carnivals constantly link to worthy sites. They focus on different topics where the participating bloggers share their newest finds in lots of different items like articles, blog posts, events, etc. If you connect the upcoming week?s blogger with helpful suggestions for content (and links) to feature, your email will be welcomed. It?s a whole new world out there and if your web site is to continue to be vibrant and well-visited, you need to keep up on all the new possibilities. Be creative, attract new and powerful links and you will see an increase in higher quality visitors to your web site.