📖 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Keywords are search terms that users enter in a search engine to find relevant sites. The generation of appropriate keywords for your site is the most critical elements of successful SEO. Keywords alone won't get you ranked well with modern search engines. You will also need to optimize your site content and focus the content on the chosen keywords making your site content as relevant to your visitors as possible.

Tips for Generating Keywords

Create a list of potential keywords for your site.

  • More is better - create a long list.
  • Include generic keywords and specific keywords.
  • Head terms are short, one or two word terms typically with high search volume.
  • Tail terms are longer and typically have lower search volume.

Select one or two head terms for your home page.

  • Should represent the overall theme of your site.
  • Difficult to get rankings because of popularity.

Select one or two tail terms for your other Web pages.

  • Initially much easier to rank well.
  • Can grow as you gain more traffic and better search engine rankings.
  • Optimize each page for one or two keywords.

Add keywords to title tag and meta tags for each page.

  • Analyze your competition by seeing how they rank for targeted keywords to identify opportunities for your own site.
  • Utilize keyword suggestion tools like Wordtracker or Search engines - look for related terms.
  • Consider misspellings and variants.

Analyze the effectiveness of keywords to select those with substantial volume and minimal competition.

  • Keywords with very high volume are often very competitive and may be difficult to rank for.
  • Keywords with very low volume may be easy to rank highly for, but won't generate much business.
  • Select keywords in the middle with enough volume to generate business, but not enough competition to prevent you from ranking high enough to appear on the first page.

Emphasize Keywords

Header Tags

  • emphasize keywords and topics visually.
  • indicates importance to search engines.
  • use CSS to give the appearance you want for your page.

Text Modifiers

  • strong (usually displayed as bold).
  • em (emphasis - usually displayed in italics).
  • indicate to a search engine the importance of words within the content.
  • visual significance to users.
  • use CSS to customize the appearance.

Keyword Density.

  • Density is the number of times a word is placed in the readable content of a page. If you have ten readable words and one word is a keyword the density of 10%. If you have 100 words and one of them is a keyword you now have a density of 1%. Keep your density between 3.5 and 7 percent.
  • Make sure to use keywords in your titles or aliases, links, and content.
  • Use your keywords wherever possible without making the text seem stilted.
  • DO NOT STUFF keywords.
  • Content that does not make sense and is full of keywords for the sole purpose of raising the keyword density will cause your site to be penalized in the search engines.
  • Use the company or site name in place of we or us.
  • Use keywords in place of it, they, them, etc.

Use Meta Tags

Meta Description.

  • displayed in results page from some search engines.
  • brief and compelling description of your page - maximum 155 characters.
  • unique for each page.
  • not as critical in search engine rankings - write for humans, not spiders.

Meta Keywords

  • no longer significant for search engine rankings, but easy and worthwhile anyway.
  • maximum 10 keywords.
  • at least 1 unique keyword on each page.

Meta Robots

  • tells search-engine spiders whether to index the page and follow links.
  • generally used to prevent a page from being indexed - for pages that a user should not get to directly (i.e. payment page).

Optimize Your Content

Now that you have created your content, you should consider ways to make them more search-engine friendly. Optimizing performance will lead to increased rankings with search engines.

Choose file names that reflect the page content.

  • Use your keywords when possible.
  • You should never use spaces in a file name, but a hyphen or underscore can have the same effect.
  • Keep names short and simple: 1-3 words.

Optimize your title tag.

  • Summarize the page content; usually displayed in search engine results page.
  • Concise (65 characters maximum. Over 65 characters may not display).
  • Use 1 or 2 keywords you want to rank for with that page.
  • Each page title should be unique.
  • Use your brand to increase name recognition.

Optimize images.

  • Search engines can't 'see' images.
  • Use alt attribute in img tag to describe image for accessibility and search engines.
  • Write unique, relevant descriptions.
  • Don't repeat unless image repeats.
  • Images should only be used where they add value, conveying something graphically or add interest and color. Don't convert text to images for style or color - use CSS.

Create effective links.

  • Use URL's - not script-based linking.
  • The clickable text should be meaningful and use keywords when possible.
  • Avoid image links when possible.
  • Include links to all tier-2 pages on the home page to increase their page rank.
  • Don't overdo links - too many on a page dilutes their impact.
  • Inline text links carry more weight than menus or lists.
  • Links higher on the page carry more weight than those lower on the page.
  • A good article on keyword linking can be found at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/seo/internal-linking.htm.

Validate HTML.

  • Improperly structured web pages may prevent a search-engine spider from seeing some content
  • Pages will display more consistently across different browsers
  • Validate at http://validator.w3.org
  • Some errors may not be easily correctable - OK to keep. One example of this is the target attribute which is not a valid XHTML attribute. To get rid of the error, you have to use JavaScript which means the search-engine won't see the link. Better to include the target attribute and get an error than to eliminate the error at the cost of SEO.

Structure your page for SEO.

  • Put CSS and scripts in separate files so spiders don't have to crawl through them to get to your content.
  • Place the most important information and links at the top of the page to give them more weight in page rankings.

Responsive Design

You'll also want to create a mobile-first site because search engines now rank mobile-compatibility high on the list of site priorities. This is due to the enormous increase in mobile site traffic.

Use simple, straightforward code. Don't add unnecessary tags, ids, classes, etc. Minify your code to remove whitespace for smaller files and faster downloads. Minified code is hard to read by humans so keep original file for edits.

Tools to help minify your code.

Combine CSS, JavaScript or image files. Use 3rd party add-ins with caution as these may use a large number of files. Consider weighing performance vs. functionality. For the server-side code should avoid redirects while utilizing file compression and caching.

Include JavaScript files at the bottom of the page (unless needed at top). Using inline JavaScript can increase performance by not requiring another page download, but decrease performance if duplicated on many site pages. Use HTML5 and CSS3 where possible and only load what is necessary. Consider breaking up large CSS code into smaller files and only include what is necessary. Using link instead of import can also speed things up.