Search Engine Optimization for the Masses

July 13, 2005 - 12:53am

1. PAGETITLES! -- Number one is worth yelling. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and every other search engine worth a tinkers damn, the page title is the most significant factor in how your page will index in searches. Most blogging software will automatically output your pagetitles within the [title][/title] tags of your blog pages. However, if you don't title your pages with words and phrases that people are going to search for -- well, I hate to say it, but you don't deserve high rankings.

2. Mind your markup -- My first blog got all of 4 referrals from google every day. At the time, I was convinced my site was cursed. I now know that the only curse preventing google traffic was my shoddy HTML markup. If your just beginning to code HTML, avoid the lure of using [div] and [span] tags, except in special circumstances that go beyond the scope of this article. My mistake was that I had enclosed my site name, page titles, and just about everything in [div] tags, not header tags like I should have. Sure [h1],[h2],[h3] display completely differently in IE explorer and Firefox, and [divs] display the same. However, make no mistake, cutting corners, and avoiding header tags will cost you. When I finally retitled everything with header tags, my traffic from google increased a cool %1500.

Speaking of which, did you know that there is actually a difference between [strong] and [b] tags, and [em] and [i] tags? This isn't an obscure theoretical difference, such as the difference between an F# and Gb. Search engines actually read [strong] and [em] tags as "especially relevent text". To a search engine,[i] and [b] mean absolutely nothing. All they do is tell the browser to make text "bold" or "italicized"[1] Which tags will you use tomorrow?

3. Captain Obvious Says "Content Matters" -- No really, if you write consistantly good content that lots of people will search for, you will see GIANT improvements in search referrals. As Captain Obvious loves to say, "content is king"

4. Forgive Nick for wanting to sleep but check back tomorrow for the next installment

Notes:

1. Or "oblique" if you want to show that your knowledge of typography makes you better than everyone else.

2. HTML tags are enclosed in '[]' because I'm lazy.