Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is based upon making your blog accessible to search engines to gather information to store in their database, and to help users search for information related to your blog. Remember, SEO means helping search engines and helping users find the information they need when using a search engine, thus encouraging them to visit your website when it appears in the search results.
You can put your do-it-yourself search engine optimization techniques to work on your entire website, but it helps to start with one web page to clean up the core optimization problems, so we’ll start there. When you find consistent and redundant errors, then you can fix them throughout your website or blog.
So, the goal is to help search engine crawlers move through your website collecting information to be stored in the search engine’s database. The key to your blog’s data making it successfully into a search engine’s database is to:
1) Make sure there are no road blocks in the path of a search engine crawler.
2) Make sure the crawler can move through your blog, examining all your web pages.
3) Provide adequate keywords and key phrases which clearly help categorize your content.
4) Provide clearly labeled tags and categories recognized by tagging service crawlers and many search engines today.
5) Take advantage of pinging services.
What is not in this list is anything that has to do with advertising. I want to be clear on this. Search engine optimization is about making your website easily accessible by search engines, it is not about how to make money with your website. Yes, SEO practices can help you make money on your blog, but only because it is lovely underneath the hood to both search engines and users, not because your ads work better. That’s a different subject known as e-commerce, search marketing or website analytics. A lot of people think SEO is e-commerce but it isn’t. Related but not the same. We’ll be focusing on your blog’s relationship with search engines and how this helps you to have a better blog.
Let’s look at each of these points to help you understand the benefits and how to do-it-yourself.
No Road Blocks: A road block for a search engine crawler moving through a website is any element that confuses, distracts, or stops a search engine crawler or spider from moving through your site. Examples of road blocks include HTML/XHMTL errors, lack of connecting and navigational links, lack of text, a table-based design, 404 page not found errors or other dead or moved links, and bad Apache .htaccess or robots.txt files.
It is critical to ensure all such errors and road blocks are fixed. To put it simply, this means you need to test, test, test your web pages.
This is not as complicated as it appears. If you are using WordPress, put your WordPress Theme through a couple validation tests to make sure it works right. While Theme designers do test their designs, double check their work to make sure the Theme validates both with HTML/XHTML, CSS, and Accessibility Standards. If you tweak your Theme, run it through the testers and validators again. Make sure that all the template files work right and meet web standards and then you are ready to go.
With a solidly functioning and error free Theme, the only place you can screw up your WordPress blog is in the content area. Most people only post text in the Write Post panel, leaving all the design elements outside of the content. But headings, bold, italic, and links are still tags that can have problems.
Hey, mistakes happen. Links are left open. A link, blockquote or other tag is messed up or not closed. Headings aren’t closed. Or an image is too big or small and pushing things around. A DIV or HTML tag might be closed when it wasn’t opened, which closes another tag early, causing all kinds of problems. There are a lot of things that will mess up your blog that can occur within your content area created with the Write Post panel, but these are human error things. Careless mistakes easily caught.
The solution is easy. Before you click the Publish button, preview your post.
The new WordPress 2.0 and WordPress.com offers instant previews of your post within your WordPress Theme, giving you a chance to really see what it looks like before you publish. If you are using an older version of WordPress, you can get the same live preview by typing in your blog URL with the post number in a new tab or window such as http://example.com/index.php?p=456. The post number appears in the Write Post Panel address bar after you have hit Save and Continue Editing. Using this method in all versions of WordPress, you can actually test your post with any web validator if you find you have problems and can’t track down the culprit easily.
A quick glance can usually catch most harmful errors. The sidebar is gone, pushed down, or borked. The whole text is a giant link. A graphic or photograph is too large or small. All are easily fixed from within the Write Post panel.
Those without WordPress’s features should check your design and layout template files thoroughly, and then frequently test your published pages with validators to make sure you continue to keep the template files in good shape.
Make these tests and checks of your blog a part of your regular maintenance schedule. It’s critical to do semi-annual website maintenance to keep your blog performing well and ready for search engines to visit.
For an extensive list of free website checkers, testers, and validators, check out my article on Validating the Code Behind the Page and Conquering Site Validation Errors. And take time to understand how search engines see, search, and visit your website so you can take the necessary steps to make that visit enjoyable.
The Crawlers Can Navigate Your Site Easily: In order to get all of your posts into a search engine’s database, the search engine crawler has to find them. As the crawler moves through your blog, it looks for links to the Pages, highlighted posts, next and previous posts, or other internal links within your layout and posts to move through to the next post. Ignored by search engines, orphan posts can happen when a post is disconnected from the other posts.
| WordPress and SEO Now, there is something you need to know about WordPress and using site search tags on your blog. Google follows all the links on your posts, and many WordPress Themes feature date, archive, and site search links which generate specific pages when clicked. Google “thinks” these are all individual web pages and follows them, adding them to their database. As of January 1, 2006, this blog has 360 posts but more than 18,000 pages are stored in Google’s database. I didn’t do anything special, that’s just WordPress doing awesome SEO right out the box. Thought you should know. |
When possible, add links to your content that connects the phrase or topic to another post on your blog. I’ve included many such examples in this article. Link list features like most recent posts, related posts, or random posts adds more navigational links to connect one post to another. You can add your site map and important Pages and posts to your footer for increased navigation, helping both the user and search engine crawler. A site map, archive, or even posts with lists of other posts on your blog will help connect the links between all of your posts.
To find out which posts from your blog are currently in a search engine database, many search engines allow you to search only for web pages exclusive to a specific domain name. In Google, the search command would be:
site:http://lorelle.wordpress.com/
Go through the list, and if you find any posts missing, the odds are likely that it is an orphan, so add some links to that post, and double check your navigational links to make sure that you have adequate links to connect all your posts to each other. As a side benefit, visitors will enjoy your blog much better if they can easily find other posts you’ve written that might interest them.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords: Keywords in your post content help search engines categorize your information in their database. They also help the user find your blog.
Think through your post for keywords people will use to search for your content. For this particular article, keywords would be seo, search engine, optimization, keywords, clean, checking, maintenance, site maintenance, cleaning, optimizing, search, crawler, search engine crawler, validation, web, and standards. If you were searching for an article on search engine optimization, the odds are that you would use one or more of these words or phrases, so it is critical to include these words or phrases in your writing, at least more than once, to make sure the search engine crawler understands that these are words important to the content of your post.
As you write your post content, adding titles, headings, links and images, write them right. Make sure that all titles and headings include one or more of your keywords, reinforcing the topic at hand. Make sure that all links and images have TITLE and ALT attributes, and again put some of your keywords in their titles and descriptions.
The better the spread of keywords in your article, without using them in between every other word like a search engine spammer, the more likely a search engine is to understand the topic you are writing about, and the more likely your audience is able to understand the topic.
There are also tools that will help you by suggesting, analyzing, and checking your keyword density to make sure you are using enough keywords and the right keywords to help categorize your content.
With so many learning about website development and design in a seat-of-the-pants educational method, the importance of words in your content is critical. I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten complaints from photographers and graphic artists that their sites or blogs are not getting into search engines or getting any decent page ranking. I ask, “Where are your words?”
“I have pictures. I don’t need words. They speak for themselves.”
Well, while modern search engines are trying, they really can’t read your pictures. They can only read your descriptions of your pictures, the ones you tend to leave out of your image links.
Without words, search engines can’t “read” anything. There is nothing to categorize or add to their database except code with links to graphics. The graphics will get picked up by Google Images or another search engine that catalogs images, but it won’t go easily into their main database. You have to have words, and you need to make sure the search engine understands the topic at hand, and that means paying attention to keywords.
Remember, content matters.
Keyword – Testers and Checkers
- Word Counter
- Ranks.nl Keyword Density and Prominence
- Keyword Density Checker
- Enginemage’s Keyword Suggestions Tool (returns keyword, domain name, and meta tag suggestions)
- Search Engine World Keyword Density Analyzer
- Search Engine Optimization Tools – Similar Page Checker
- Keyword Counter
- Keyword Validators with Search Engines
- Webjectives Keyword Density Analyzer
- Webmaster Toolkit’s Web Page Analyser for Search Engine Keywords
Keyword Articles and Resources
- What Are Keywords
- Website Development – Keywords Help You Write Your Blog
- Website Development – Listing The Keywords Inside
- How Search Engines See, Search, and Visit Your Website
- How People Search the Web and How They Can Find Your Blog
Tags and Categories: Categories are for users. Tags are for tagging services like Technorati. Is that clear? Now, let me confuse things.
Tagging arrived a little over a year ago and took the web by storm. Tagging is part of a movement towards “social bookmarks”, a method of creating mini-categories for post content which are similar but not quite the same as keywords, and using people’s opinion to promote interesting websites, blogs, and information to the top of a list created, in part, by tag services.
Categories help your visitor move through your blog finding related material. For instance, on this site, I have categories for WordPress News and WordPress Tips. If you are visiting this blog and are interested in tips related to WordPress, then you would visit the posts within that category. Pretty self-explanatory, right?
WordPress marks categories automatically as tags. This is great as it instantly adds tags to your post, but not all categories are worthy of being tagged. For instance, my category, Blog Babble is a lousy tag. Who is going to search for “blog babble”? No one. But you instantly understand that you will find posts within that category related to blogging. It’s a synonym for “talking about blogs and blogging”. Search engines and tagging services don’t deal well with synonyms. This is just one example of the many problems with tags. I like my few neat categories and so I manually add tags to the bottom of my posts.
Tags categorize your content with keywords into micro-categories used by tagging services. They can be chosen by you and posted on and within your posts on your blog, or by users who “tag” your post in their tagging service account, which then may help other users who are searching that tagging service for that particular tag.
Tags are similar but different from keywords. Keywords are what people will use in search engines to find your information, while tags are used by those using tag services to find your information. Search engines are slowly embracing tagging, so the line between these two is blurring.
The keywords on this post might be:
seo, search engine, optimization, keywords, clean, checking, maintenance, site maintenance, cleaning, optimizing, search, crawler, search engine crawler, validation, web, and standards
The tags could be one or more of the following:
seo, search+engine, optimization, keywords, validation, standards, webdev, web+development
Any link can be assigned a “relationship” as a tag.
The link can be to anything. It can be, as shown, to a search page that looks for posts with the word “Apple”. It can go to any tagging service like Technorati. It can also go to applesrus.com or any web page link.
Search engines and tagging service crawlers or spiders come through your blog after being pinged or upon invitation to find every mention of rel="tag" and add that to their database along with part or all of that page, connecting the tag with your content. Users will visit Technorati and type in a keyword, like “apple”, and all posts with tags for “apple” will appear in the search results. If you have a post that is all about apples, but you haven’t included a tag for “apple”, then the tagging services will not have that post listed under “apple”. This makes tagging services limiting since their database returns are based upon tags not overall content and keywords. Still, tagging services offer an alternative to searching from traditional search engines and tend to focus their search results on blogs rather than traditional websites.
Whether or not your categories serve solely as your tags or you add tagging elsewhere in your blog, it is up to you. Either way, many search engines, in addition to tagging services, are now using tags to collect information about the content on your blog and blog posts. Learn how to use them and when.
Get Pinged: Pinging has been around for a long time, but it is now being used in a new, and better, way. According to Wikipedia:
Ping is the name of a computer network tool used on TCP/IP networks (such as the Internet). It provides a basic test of whether a particular host is operating properly and is reachable on the network from the testing host. Ping provides estimates of the round-trip time and packet loss rate between hosts. It works by sending ICMP “echo request?? packets to the target host and listening for replies (ICMP “echo response?? packets).
Does that make sense? Basically, a ping is like a knock on the door. When used on websites and blogs, pinging services take your blog address (URL) and knock on the door of, say, Technorati, and says “Hey, I have a friend I want you to meet. You need to check them out. Here is their card.”
Pinging is built into WordPress right out of the box. Every time you publish a new post, a ping goes to Ping-o-matic, which then forwards a ping onto many different search engines and tagging services to let them know that you have new content and to send out their crawlers and spiders to take a look.
In a moment I will talk more about search engine submissions, but pinging has basically replaced site submissions. With WordPress and WordPressMU, pinging happens behind the scenes invisibly. You don’t even know that its happening, but your blog shows up on tagging services and search engines with no effort from you.
Pinging is critical to SEO techniques today, so if you aren’t using WordPress, consider learning to manually ping to knock on the doors of search engines and tagging services to let them know you are available.
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