Knowledge Base

Search Engine Optimization

One of the hottest subjects in internet marketing is Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is, at it's best, a way of managing the content and code of a web site so that it best represents what the site is trying to do. At it's worst, it's a scam to trick an innocent search engine algorithm into thinking a site is relevant when it's not.

The core philosophy of SEO is generally that you can raise the visibility of a web site by massaging the content, the code, and by building links to the site. This is all true and reasonable. The practice is frequently more extreme, unfortunately. SEO is commonly an attempt to raise the visibility of a site by exaggerating the presence of certain key terms, and thus perverting the intent of meaningful, semantic) presentation of information.

Best practice search engine optimization should balance an accurate portrayal of your company and services or products with the key phrases that your business needs to rank for in order to be found online.

SEO is based around the knowledge that all Search Engines, and particularly the two biggest - Google and Bing - use patterns called algorithms to find and rank the web sites they list in their search results. These patterns look at a number of factors to decide whether your site is relevant to the search terms entered in the search box. Search engines are understandably secretive about the specific rules of their search algorithms, so it is difficult to know exactly what they are looking at. However, some factors are fairly certain:

• the number of inbound links to your site (who is linking to you),
• the position of the search term on your site
• the anchor text of links pointing at your site.

Although it is certainly important to have your specific search terms present on your site, the phenomenon of Google bombing depends on the importance of inbound anchor texts. Google bombing is a unique situation, however, and certainly not recommended for a legitimate business. If you want to consider the best principle for designing content and link texts simply keep this in mind:

Search engines want to find the same thing your users want to find: quality, relevant information.

Although search engines are not yet capable of thinking in the same way as a human visitor, the programmers designing these algorithms are real human visitors - and these thousands of dedicated scientists are spending their working hours trying to figure out what about a web site makes it valuable to a human. Don't consider search engines as a separate entity from your human visitors. Instead, consider a search engine as a type of disabled visitor - one who is blind to your images, can't access your Javascript based navigation, and doesn't really care about the beauty of your flash animation. The search engine isn't your market, and can't be considered when it comes to conversion potential, but it's extremely important when it comes to perception of relevance.

There are fundamental baselines for smart web site construction which can aid your marketing scheme, and which will also aid your human users in accessing the information they need.

Links are ultimately, mostly out of the control of the web creator. You can ask other sites to link to you, and you can purchase links on some sites, but the most valuable way to gain links is by creating link-worthy content for your site ("linkbaiting") or for other sites which may provide a link to your site either in your biographical materials or your byline. This requires a great deal of time and commitment to accomplish, but is effective and valuable. Not only does it provide links, but also what is frequently called "mind-share" - your site and the information you provide is brought in front of a larger audience. This audience will have some awareness of your site even if they don't immediately visit it.

Accessibility and SEO

Accessibility offers quite a few inherent benefits for SEO. The most common metaphor is to consider that a search engine robot is the most frequent disabled visitor your site may receive: it's blind, it navigates with Javascript disabled, and if it can't operate a link it stops cold. Since one of the principles of accessibility is about ensuring that your website can be navigated and understood by a blind visitor who is unable to use Javascript, these characteristics are an automatic guarantee for a well-designed accessible web site.

Best practice accessibility also requires other characteristics of benefit to SEO: use of proper h1, h2, and other heading elements are important for both. Use of unique title elements which clearly describe the page are valuable for both purposes.

Accessibility features can be abused for the purpose of SEO, however.

A good example of how a tool for accessibility can be misused through SEO is by examining the title attribute. A little explanation the title attribute - title is a means of providing additional information about any element of a webpage. This is significantly different from the title element, described above — which is used to provide search engine results links and is displayed in the header area of your web browser.

Links can have a title attribute explaining where they go, acronyms may have a title providing the expansion of the abbreviation, etc. To an accessibility consultant, the title attribute is a great place to offer assistance to the visually impaired by providing a short, concise explanation in the title. To an SEO consultant the title attribute may be a great place to repeat keywords. Rather than saying "Link to Homepage", they may say "Widgets, gidgets, gadgets and more home page".

This is not unreasonable once, but when there may be 25 title attributes which all begin with the same phrase it can be very tedious for a visually impaired web user who is listening to the page as read by a screen reader. The title attribute is not, in fact, an element which is read by a screen reader using default settings. However, if it has been enabled this is presumably because that visitor needs the information contained in the title attribute - and this excess verbiage will not be helpful or appreciated.

Positions of importance for keywords include headings, emphasized text (bold or italics), and text which appears early in the page when viewed in a linear fashion. What does that mean? In most HTML based designs, the positioning of elements is accomplished using the table element. Like a table in a word processing document or spreadsheet, the content must appear in a left-right, top-bottom format. However, in a standards based, accessible document, the code is usually presented using an alternate method which is non-linear. The appearance of the elements on the page does not necessarily match the appearance in the HTML code. Thus, your well-written content can appear first to search engines.