In general, you want to optimize for search engines as it is one of the most common ways to get visitors to your site, and without visitors to your site, it’s hard to stay in business now a days. If you need a quick overview of how a search engine works, I even have that for you to review.
Over the years, there have been many changes to how we optimize for search engines. These have changed based upon the predominant search engine, as well as changes to how search engines work – as Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm.
Modern search engines look for two major components, internal factors (which you can control usually) and external (which if they are truly external are harder to control). Because external factors are harder to control, and more likely to be viewed as someone “vouching” for you/your site, they tend to get more “weight” in the search algorithm, but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore internal factors, as that can still move you up or down the search ranking.
Now some people think that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) whether internal or external, is designed to trick the search engine. I’m thinking these are the people who don’t dress up for interviews or clean their house when guest are expected.
It’s not “tricking” but putting the best foot forward, and if done right, it will help identify to others your website is about.
Black Hat Techniques
Black hat techniques are generally considered to be “cheating” because they rely in tricking or misleading the search engines, and thus users, and this shouldn’t be done. If you want to see examples of Internal Black Hat techniques, which don’t work anymore, I have some common examples of Black Hat techniques you can review.
Commonly Accepted Techniques
Luckily, there are several things you can do to legitimately improve your search ranking by modifying your page. We’ll take a look at several of them
Properly Construct Your Page
While we saw and talked about how many older pages used tables to develop the layout of the page, we said that this was not a good idea now with CSS.
Well with HTML 5, Search Engines, especially Google, were heavily involved in coming up with the container classes like article, main, aside, nav, header, footer, etc. They allow you to organize and group your content better. In doing so, it also allows Search Engines to know how to better search and rank your content.
How does it do this, well it does things like give lower weight to in the sidebar of your website, or in sections which are repeated, like headers and footers. By using header and footer tags, we can let the search engine know that this isn’t one of the key areas to focus on. Likewise, we can use the main and article tags to let search engines know to focus their efforts on this portion of the webpage.
Headings
Headings – those h1,h2, etc tags, let the search engine know key and important terms for a webpage. So for example, if you look at this page, you can see how it is broken down into sections which allow the user to skip to a section which they would find important.
By using heading tags, not just classes which make the text look bigger, we can give clues to the search engine on what is important. We want to use heading tags appropriately, so that key terms and phrases that people would use will be inside of them, making the page better for both people and search engines.
Warning:
However, you don’t want to make everything a heading, to try to trick search engines. They are looking for only a certain percentage of text to be heading, and if you go beyond that, you are likely to be penalized, especially if you use CSS to try to make the text look like “normal” text.
Internal Links
Internal links are anchor tags that link from one page to another on your website. They can take several forms, such as menu navigation, or links found within the content of a web page. These are called contextual links.
Because search engines have been looking at how to group data, and giving less importance to repeating elements like menus, your contextual links are becoming more and more important.
These internal links are different from external links because the local webmaster can control them, and use them and they are found on the same website, not from some externally hosted site. While external links are given a higher importance, internal links can still be valuable for various reasons.
First, as with external linking, a high number of (even internal) links to a page, suggests to a search engine that that page is important, and therefore the search engine should pay extra attention to it.
Second, these links help search engines find new content. If content is only found on one page, and that page is only scanned for updates once a month, for example, it would be a month before the search engine found that update. However, if a search engine scans a set of pages every few days, by having three, four, or more pages link to a new page, it is more likely to be found faster. Now how often a search engine scans a page varies based upon the website and how often they update their content, but that’s a different story about how search engines work.
Finally, it will allow the search engine and the user to dive into more content and focus on more content within your website, keeping them there longer. It will allow people and search engines to determine what is important by counting how many times you link to something.
This is the basic idea behind Wikipedia. It allows dozens of pages to be link, and keeps the user digging deeper into content, until they are no longer even on content where they used to be.
Optimizing Links
In a perfect and simple world, you could just create links, and all would be good. However, too many links can cause issues as well. Generally to properly optimize, you want to think about which pages do you want people to go to, and work on creating links to those pages, and not necessarily any other page(s).
With a small website this isn’t as big of an issue, but with a website of hundreds or even thousands of pages, this can become quite the task.
You also want to work on building links with the link text being useful for the end user and thus the search engine.
Internal Search Engine Optimization was originally found on Access 2 Learn
