SEO: Myth and Reality
Since I moved Rasa Design Studio back to to Boston, Massachusetts, I’ve been struck by the amount of misinformation there is about web site marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are several request for proposals circulating from this area that are looking for SEO “to be done” on their sites. Once the mystical SEO “process” is completed, their site should float to the top of Google, … or, so the idea is understood.
Right. That’s not how it works.
By itself, a site that’s optimized for search engines does absolutely nothing to actually promote a site let alone convert visitors that actually visit. That said, a web site that isn’t optimized for search engines will definitely get in the way of search engines that are trying to index the site.
While SEO is a necessary part of the entire marketing effort, it is yet only a very small part. Since most of our clients seem to segue into marketing with “SEO,” let’s talk about what it is and what it is not; what is expected and what the intended result should be. From there, I’ll write other articles on how to leverage an SEO site for full marketing potential.
What Google would like to see
Google represents anywhere from 65% – 90% of all non-advertised visitors to a site depending on the industry and business of the web site in question. This means that Google is the 900 pound gorilla that every eCommerce and eBusiness site needs to cater to. Given that, it behooves site owners and site developers to concentrate on Google’s needs in order to achieve the maximum number of qualified search result visitors to a site… from there, a site can concentrate on actually ‘converting’ those visitors into paying customers.
Google is in the business of returning qualified search results to its own visitors based on ‘keyword strings’ (phrases of 1 or more keywords) that visitors type into its search form. Google indexes as many web site pages as possible by sending ‘robots’ out onto the web to read individual web pages, catalog and rate keyword usage on each page and measure the number of incoming links to each page in relation to the keywords it finds.
The exact scoring mechanism that Google uses is a closely guarded secret that has spawned an entire industry devoted to nothing other than finding out what, exactly, Google likes and doesn’t like. In short, though, it can be said that a web page that scores high in the use of certain keywords shows up near the top of a search result page and attracts a lot more visitors than a site that doesn’t score highly.
Sites that try to ‘fool’ Google into thinking that their web page is about a certain keyword when, in fact, it’s really not… well, they get penalized or even banned from Google.
Remember that Google indexes web PAGES and not web SITES.
Let me say that, again: Google indexes individual PAGES on YOUR SITE and does NOT rank your site as a whole.
That means that every page on a web site needs to be optimized for one and only one keyword string. Links coming to a site with a reference to those keywords need to lead to the interior PAGE and not to the home page of the SITE. As an example of how this looks, consider searching for a book title and see what page on Amazon.com the search results lead to: Not Amazon’s Home page, but rather to the interior page most closely related to the keyword you searched for.
Characteristics of an SEO site
If you look at a typical newspaper, you’ll see that there’s a lot of text with different size and boldness on the page. A lead article may have the name of the newspaper (e.g. The New York Times) in the boldest and largest text, lead stories with large, bold text; titles with lesser sized bold sub-titles underneath. Some articles may even have a third line of bolded text before the paragraph text of the actual article begins.
HTML and XHTML marks up it’s text copy in the same way with ‘tags.’
Title Tag: The ‘name of the newspaper page which shows up on the top of a browser window. In windows, it’s the blue part of the window and the text there tells Google the very first things about what it should expect to see on the rest of the page.
h1, h2, h3, etc header tags: These are equivalent to newspaper article headlines with h1 being the most important, largest and boldest text on a page and subsequent headers being the sub-headers of a page. Keywords found in the h1 – h7 header tags tell Google that at least PART of the paragraph text that follows will be about that header.
p: Paragraph Text. Keyword strings should be scattered throughout to support the h1-h7 and title tags.
Bold (b or ’strong’ tags): Bolded text is considered more important than regular text.
a: Anchor tags are the URL links that you see on a page. Two things about this: linked text with a URL that includes a keyword phrase that ALSO SHOWS UP on the linked page is counted in two ways by Google: (1) The incoming link to the next page is counted, (2) The keyword phrase is counted.
Other elements
A word on “tables.”
Tables have long been used as a layout device for designers since the old days when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were having it out. Designs that use tables have an inherent disadvantage to designs that make use of “tableless” designs: Information in a tableless design is more likely to be presented to Google in a contextually relevant way. There are other advantages to tableless designs, but the SEO factor is the most important.
Ordered and Unordered Lists (UL, OL and LI tags): A list of items is, by nature of being part of the list, contextually related to all of the other elements on a the same list. Navigation menus that make use of vertical or horizontal list ‘buttons’ not only use less code than table systems, but also are read in a contextual way.
Design Graphics can be added as part of the HTML (sometimes messy) or as a ‘background image’ delivered by the CSS stylesheet. Rasa Design Studio makes use of background images to deliver the logo graphic and provide actual h1, h2, p keywords that can be seen by Google and not by the user. The techniques are NOT ‘black hat’ and add immeasurably to a page ranking.
With most of our design elements delivered by CSS, the actual HTML or XHTML code ends up being very light and nearly 1/3 the file size of tabled designs.
Google doesn’t really read meta tags, but other search engines do: We take the meta keyword and description tag content and mirror them in the H1 and H2 content of the page. In CSS, the H1 and H2 tags are set with display:none; and the background graphic is the logo. Visitors see a logo and Google sees text relevant to the rest of the page. Warning: If the H1 and H2 are NOT relevant to the rest of the page, Google might see the page as an attempt to ’spam’ keywords and will penalize the page and the site.
That’s only a taste of the SEO site elements. Now that you have an SEO site, what do you do with it to actually MARKET and PROMOTE the site?
SEO is passive. You’re not actually ‘doing’ anything for your site, but rather just getting out of the way of Google so that it can do it’s job. Marketing and Promotion are actions. Remember that Google counts the number of incoming links to your site so one promotion effort is to make sure that there are links leading to interior pages of your site from other, relevant, high-ranking sites. If the link contains keywords that are also found on your landing page, the link is worth more. Thus, CSS osCommerce leading to a page about CSS osCommerce is going to be worth more than click here if the page the link leads to actually talks about CSS osCommerce.
Internal links with keywords don’t count as highly as external links, but they still count. Therefore, interlinking strategies on your own site is important.
The ‘Value Proposition’ and other elements of each page will be left for another article (and once written will be interlinked from this page) but is also important for design considerations for the user experience. These elements actually lead to conversion and are as important as attracting visitors to a page.
I hope this article helps to clear up misunderstandings on the role and value of SEO. If you need your site redesigned for SEO and marketing, please feel free to contact us at any time.
– Sean Rice