I get asked a lot of SEO questions from work at home moms and small business clients. It’s time for me to do a series on SEO to get some of these questions answered! Many people ask me “Do you *do* SEO?”. My answer is simply “No”. There are a lot of things you can do to an existing site to help with SEO but we’ll get to that later. The simple answer of “No” is because good SEO on a web site really needs to start in the planning stages of your web design! I focus on creating websites that are SEO friendly right from the start!

Let’s start out with the basics! SEO? What’s that? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When people are talking about SEO they are referring to search engines and how you are indexed. The optimization part comes into play when we talk about how you get your site prepared to be listed, how you manage your site to maintain listings and how to increase your ranking. You are optimizing your search engine experience. The next terms that comes up are spiders and robots. Spiders and robots are parts of the search engine software that actually scour the internet reading web sites and collecting the data. These spiders go out and read websites looking for information that it can bring back to the main database (search engine) to be indexed. We want to make it easy for the spiders to find data to bring back to the main database so we’ll start with that.

Spiders crawl your site bringing back data, that data is in the form of text. So when you are just starting out creating your website you need to keep this in mind. Spiders can not read images, flash or other multi-media files. They depend on the text content, both visible and invisible, to gather the data from. So the first step in your design is to make sure you offer lots of opportunity for text to be present! Give your images descriptive alt tags, use minimal flash and leave space for text on each page. Many web site owners want to wow their visitors with fancy all flash websites. Unfortunately all the spiders are seeing are maybe a few meta tags and nothing else. If there is no text, what are the spiders going to bring back to index? Nothing! Your site may look great, but will you get many visitors from search results?

Types of text: visible and invisible.
Invisible text is any text that visitors can not see without reading the code of a website. Metas are the parts of your head code that define your site, its the first clue to spiders that indicates what your site is about. There is a lot of controversy about how important metas are now days. Most search engines put the bulk of the weight into your content text, but its a good idea not to ignore your meta tags either. Commonly used meta tags include the keywords and description. You’ll want to make sure you list the keywords that are relevant to your website, your brand names, content and even misspellings. Its rumored that search engines will cross reference these keywords to your content to see what is most relevant. I say rumored because the search engines keep the specifics of how they rank and index under lock and key! The description tag is a sentence or two about your site. This is how some search engines display your content under your website name in a search result. Keep it short and sweet. Don’t use promotional jargon in your description. Simply describe your site and its content accurately. My web meta may be “web design services for work at home moms and small businesses.” It simply describes what it is I do, what information you will find on my site. Alt tags are tags that give visual elements a text description. I said earlier that search engines can’t read graphical text or images, if you give them an alt tag they can read the alt tag instead! So make sure to give your images an alt tag that is descriptive.

Visible text is any text that is visible to a web site visitor. The first visible text we’ll talk about is the title tag. This is an important one! The title tag displays the web site name at the top of the browser window and also in search engine results. How many times have you searched for something and see “untitled” or “page 1″ as a result? Think of all the brand recognition those websites are missing out on, not to mention usable text placement! You want your title to be descriptive of your website as well. It’s a snap shot of your page content, much like the description meta. Only this one is also visible. A suitable title may be “Web Savvy Mama web design, contact us” for the contact page. Notice I included my company name, a keyword and the topic of the page. Content text is the guts of your website. Make sure all your text is relevant to your website. You don’t need long ramblings of your life history if you are trying to sell something unrelated. This doesn’t mean that you don’t want to include it, this just means that you should probably keep it short and sweet. Make sure your content is relevant. Use your keywords when you are writing your content. Use them often and appropriately! Don’t create long lists of keywords in your text content, not only is it boring for your readers but spiders do catch on and you may get penalized!

Content: So now you know what types of text you can include, how do you decide what the actual content should be? The topic of your content is just important as how it is presented. When selling your site/services/product to a customer you need to first determine WHO your customers or visitors are! Knowing who is going to be searching for your website will help you determine how they are going to be searching. You may sell “baby slings” but your customers may be searching for “infant carriers”. It’s the same product, different search keywords! So if you only use “baby sling” throughout your site, do you think you’ll get good results for “infant carrier”? And just because you put baby carrier in your meta tag does not mean you will automatically get good listings for the term. Remember, the content is just (even more) important! Make sure to use a wide variety of keywords throughout your website. Another part of content creation is also about making your content something people want to read and keep coming back to. You want people to want to link to your site!

Links are important in your search engine rankings. And it’s not just about the amount of links you have coming into your site (but that is important too), its also about the quality! You want the incoming links to your site to be relevant to the content of your site and coming from reputable sources. A link to a web design site isn’t going to weigh as much coming a fish factory web site as it will from a technical blog about web services. An obscure link on a website of unrelated content is going to garner less clicks than a link on a website that is related to your content. Search engines can tell the difference and will give the related content website more credit than an unrelated. What does this mean? Be careful about how you get incoming links! Don’t submit your link to link farms, these are looked down on by search engines and can actually hurt your ranking! Link farms are websites that gather links in long lists of unrelated websites on a page, often in trade for placing a link on your own site to boost their rankings. Chances are you’ll never get a click from these sites and in the end you may get penalized for participating in them. My best advice is to just avoid them! Alternatively, trade links with companies that sell related services or that have a similar client base. You’ll get more visitors from those links and can know how your link is being used. How my link is being used? Another way links help are to link keywords with your website. When you post a link you have the option of setting the clickable words that lead to the URL of the website. These clickable words help establish the keyword relevance to your website. So if you request that your target keywords are used for the clickable link you are helping to show the spiders that your site should be ranked better according to those keywords. Links to my site might use the clickable text of “web design”. But again, be careful! If you start using unrelated text in hopes the the attractive but unrelated keywords will drive traffic to your site, think again! The use of unrelated keywords as links in hopes to drive your rankings higher for those keywords is called “google bombing” or “spamdexing”. The search engines have caught on to these as well and punish sites who use that technique. So don’t link to your site using the name of a popular competitor in hopes that it will drive their customers to your site! A great example is when someone discovered this technique and used it to influence the search results of the keywords “miserable failure”. The top results for these keywords on Google and Yahoo! lead to George Bush’s website. But how does this relate to small businesses and what I’ve been talking about? Remember when I talked about link farms? Often times these link farms are fronts for other websites to collect incoming links to their own sites, namely, porn sites. If you keep submitting to link farms and they are continually linking back to porn sites, guess what is going to start to be related to YOUR search results? Yup, porn.

So know who is linking to you, be selective in your reciprocal links and select the link text itself carefully. You can get good links by going back to the previous topic, content. Have content that make people want to link to your site. What you are reading now is an example of this in action! I try to keep updated on my blog because I get good link backs from this content. The content is relevant to my web site and people are interested in it. Another example is on my other website babyspaceslings.com, I had an entire section of my site devoted to content that made users want to link to my website. This included relevant articles, activities and other resources that brought in the visitors. Those visitors then stayed and looked around my web site and found my products. Again, the keyword here is “relevant”! If the content isn’t relevant those visitors are not going to turn into sales. Find out how you can add content to your website that makes people want to link to it!

That’s it for now! This will give you a kick start on looking at your current website and seeing how you can improve your SEO. I will continue on with this topic in the near future to talk about specific methods to help with your SEO, other ways to increase the amount of website visitors and turning those visitors into customers. Look for other topics posted soon titled “Website Optimization“

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