Search engine optimization (SEO) guide: a systematic approach

Optimize your website content keywords to improve search engine rank positioning.

Choosing the keywords and phrases for your website.

The keywords and phrases that you incorporate into your web pages will be the building blocks of your optimization strategy and some time spent on choosing the most appropriate ones is going to be time well spent. You should have an idea about the words that you wish to include based on your content and your target audience. Consider what are the likely search words and phrases a potential visitor is likely to key into the search engine. Take account of what keywords and phrases your rivals are using and consider that there may be a better way to target a common audience and draw them to your website instead of the rival site.

Choosing too many keywords spread over too broad a subject matter risks diluting the effectiveness of the individual words and may place your site in an extremely competitive area with little chance of competing against other more established websites. Choosing inappropriate keywords or words too restrictive in subject matter may risk loosing the opportunity of capturing a larger audience.

Keyword and phrase placement within the web page.

A search engine's spider such as Google's Googlebot will crawl a web page and index the full content of the page: the source code of the page XHTML or HTML and the human readable text. Emphasis is given to the words that are contained within certain XHTML elements and tags in the page. If you are unfamiliar with scripting XHTML you can follow tutorials on this website that start with XHTML: Basics. Googlebot will also harvest all the links on that web page so it can do a deep crawl of the whole website. Therefore the keywords and phrases you have chosen to describe your website will need to appear in strategic elements in the XHTML as well as in the human readable text.

There are essentially 8 areas where you can utilize keyword placement:

1. The website domain name

2. The page file name

3. Page title

4. Meta tags

5. Page headings

6. Page content body text

7. Navigation text

8. Image description titles

Domain and page file name.

A descriptive website domain name can be positive for a SEO strategy but choose incorrectly and it can be a burden that is impossible to change if your website expands into areas that you initially thought that you would not create content for.

Descriptive page file names are easier to create and expand upon as the content of your site develops. I shall use a couple of web pages from this website to give some examples. I am not saying they are the ultimate in the implementation of a SEO strategy, they are just examples. See Figure 1 below, the returned result from Google for the query 'javascript cookie code':

Figure 1

The page file name is contained in line 4 of the returned query result: the bottom green text. The search query terms found in the page file name have been made bold by the search engine. The potential visitor to your website will not be so concerned with the actual domain name but will be drawn to the highlighted text that matches their original query.

Page title and meta tags.

Certainly the most important of these is the title that you give to the web page. A relevant descriptive page title element is essential and I would keep it to 60 characters in length maximum including spaces. Looking again at Figure 1 above, the page title is line 1 of the returned result and is essentially the link that you are inviting the potential visitor to click on. It needs to be relevant, descriptive and inviting.

There are two meta tags available for keyword placement: meta 'description' and 'keywords'.

It is worthwhile making sure that the meta description contains relevant content and can be to 150 characters long including spaces. Looking once again at Figure 1 above, the meta description is contained in line 2 and line 3 of the returned result. It fits within the returned results character limits and contain a summary and confirmation that the potential visitor is likely to find the information that they need if they visit that website.

Meta keywords have fallen out of favour and most search engines do not rank the content. I would still recommend using them for the search engines that do but keep the length to an absolute minimum.

So far then we have in the source code of our web page and using Figure 1 as an example the following in Listing 1 below. You are only interested in the <title></title> and <meta name= /> entries, I have only included the surrounding source code so your can see the placement of those elements in the overall page.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" 
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

<title>JavaScript code snippet page: Cookies</title>
<meta name="description" content="A resource for web developers using 
XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP. A code snippet library with step by step 
tutorials. Free standard templates." />
<meta name="keywords" content="JavaScript, cookies," />
</head>

<body>
<h1>JavaScript: Cookies - store and retrieve visitor data and preferences.</h1>
<h2>This page demonstrates how to process Cookies using JavaScript.</h2>

<p>For a simple create cookie function ...</p>
</body>
</html>	
	

Listing 1

Page headings and page content body text.

A descending level of importance is assigned to the heading elements within a web page by the search engine from the <h1></h1> to the <h6></h6> elements but I would not be concerned with going beyond <h3></h3>. See Figure 2 below, the returned result from Google for the query 'basic XHTML':

Figure 2

In this example the <h1> header is contained in line 2 of the returned query result. There is a seamless continuation into the <h2> header on line 2 and continuing on line 3. Both headers fit within the returned results character limits of approximately 150 characters and contain a summary and confirmation that the potential visitor is likely to find the information that they need if they visit that website.

The source code for the web page containing the headings in Figure 2 above is shown in Listing 2 below. As you can see the keyword phrase 'basic XHTML' does not appear in the meta description and this is why it has not been returned by the search engine. No problem here because with have that keyword phrase covered in the heading text.

Think of the web page elements as filters that are attempting to capture the search query terms. The first filter, the meta description, was too coarse and allowed the terms through but the header element filter was finer and was able to capture the query terms.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" 
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

<title>XHTML code snippet page: Basics</title>
<meta name="description" content="A resource for web developers using 
XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP. A code snippet library with step by step 
tutorials. Free standard templates." />
<meta name="keywords" content="XHTML, HTML," />
</head>

<body>
<h1>XHTML: Basics - beginning with Extensible Hypertext Markup Language.</h1>
<h2>This page introduces you to some basic XHTML with code snippet examples.</h2>

<p>Let us start with the source code of two very basic templates for a...</p>
</body>
</html>	
	

Listing 2

The page content body text is for this example contained in the <p></p> element but in reality the page content could be surrounded by divisions and subdivisions depending on the template for the web page design. Do not under estimate the importance incorporating keywords into the actual content even though it did not appear in the returned search results for this example. It is after all the content that your visitors are interested in and it is the quality of the content that will encourage a return visit. The content must be relevant to all the elements that we have discussed and if it is then it is inevitable that it will contain a sprinkling of keywords within it and this is a positive.

Navigation text and image description titles.

The search engine spider will attempt to harvest all the links on a web page so it can do a deep crawl of the whole website. You need to make it easy for the spider to do that. The spider cannot read the text on a navigation link that is a button image or links that are reliant on client-side scripts. Links made from pure text are positive for a SEO strategy. All images including buttons will benefit from text alternative descriptions and titles. For example in Listing 3 below all the links are text links and contain a 'title' attribute containing a descriptive summary of the page that the link goes to. The subject content of the linked page must be compatible with the link description.

<a href="/javascriptbasics.php" 
title="JavaScript: Basics - beginning with JavaScript">JavaScript: Basics</a>

<a href="/javascriptstrings.php" 
title="JavaScript: Strings - an array of characters">JavaScript: Strings</a>

<a href="/javascriptmaths.php" 
title="JavaScript: Maths - numbers and operators">JavaScript: Maths</a>
	

Listing 3

In Listing 4 below the image has an alternative description and title created with the 'alt' and 'title' attributes respectively. The alt attribute is designed to place descriptive text in the image space holder if for some reason the image is not displayed. The title attribute is designed to produce a text description of the image when the mouse cursor hovers over the image. The chance to place some strategic keywords in these attributes should not be overlooked but keep it to under 60 characters including spaces.

<img src="/images/sitelogo.gif" alt="justfigures.co.uk"
title="justfigures.co.uk" width="107" height="43" />
	

Listing 4

Some links on your website will be pointing to an external resource for your visitor to follow and I am assuming you would prefer that the spider does not harvest and follow that link for indexing then you will need to include the 'rel' attribute: Listing 5 below. This will instruct the spider not to follow that link to your 'competitor's' website.

<a href="http://www.external-resource-link.com" rel="nofollow"
title="Great external resource">www.external-resource-link.com</a>
	

Listing 5

Congratulations your website is now fully optimized? Well no actually, because optimizing your website is an ongoing process of continual development and experimentation. I would not like to make an announcement that any website is ever fully optimized but having an idea what the spider is looking for and indexing on your site will at least give you a fighting chance.

Article by: David Beet.

Date: 15th June 2009.

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