Anyways. I've been toying with the layout and setup for this blog for the past four or so days, and yesterday I finally decided it was time to optimize this blog - and my old one - for search engines.
It's literally performing miracles right now, so I'm going to write a little bit about the super simple things I did and how you can do them, too.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization - SEO - is the practice of setting up a website's content, code, and layout in such a manner that search engines appreciate it. This appreciation comes in the form of a higher position on the results pages of searches - SERPs, or search engine results pages.
This is important. For those of you who don't quite grasp why immediately, think of how often you or someone else uses Google. Now, take a website. Move it from the tenth result for a specific common search to the first, and see how much more traffic it generates.
It's a lot.
To put it perspective, my old blog - that one I don't update anymore - has a handful of articles that show up fairly high up in Google searches. Yesterday I implemented some of the techniques we'll discuss later, and the views on that blog have gone up literally ten-fold, and only seem to be increasing.
Still a little under 100 views every day, but for a business that is looking to make money off of views - or a blogger who wants people to read his articles - that sort of change can be a very large one.
This is important. For those of you who don't quite grasp why immediately, think of how often you or someone else uses Google. Now, take a website. Move it from the tenth result for a specific common search to the first, and see how much more traffic it generates.
It's a lot.
To put it perspective, my old blog - that one I don't update anymore - has a handful of articles that show up fairly high up in Google searches. Yesterday I implemented some of the techniques we'll discuss later, and the views on that blog have gone up literally ten-fold, and only seem to be increasing.
Still a little under 100 views every day, but for a business that is looking to make money off of views - or a blogger who wants people to read his articles - that sort of change can be a very large one.
Search Engine Algorithms
So we want to optimize a website for high SERP positioning. To do this, we need to understand how these positions are calculated.
For this, we will consider Google, as this is the search engine I am most familiar with.
Google's search engine algorithm has two facets - PR and relevance.
PR is a page's page rank. Page rank is a measure of how influential a certain page is on the Internet, and this is modeled through use of links that point at the page - the higher quantity and quality of the links, the higher the page's PR.
It's also technically a complicated Markov Chain model that treats pages as states and links as methods of changing state, but that's largely unimportant here.
PR is determined before any searches are made, and can largely be considered 'passive.' The active portion of determining a page's SERP position I've labeled as relevance, but is more like a group of related things that all look at how closely related a page is to the entered search.
There are a number of important things to consider here...
Meta tags are the simplest. You know how more or less every page is built with HTML? Well, the very top of the HTML on every page is the <head>, and the <head> contains the meta tags. These tags tell people things about the website - what releases of certain things it uses, what character set it uses, and, most importantly for our discussion, a description of the site and a set of keywords related to the site.
The description and keyword meta tags are one of the most important things one can do to increase a page's SERP position.
Outside of this, just making sure that your content contains important keywords related to what you're talking about, ensuring fairly constant content updates, and trying to make content that is quality are all important.
For this, we will consider Google, as this is the search engine I am most familiar with.
Google's search engine algorithm has two facets - PR and relevance.
PR is a page's page rank. Page rank is a measure of how influential a certain page is on the Internet, and this is modeled through use of links that point at the page - the higher quantity and quality of the links, the higher the page's PR.
It's also technically a complicated Markov Chain model that treats pages as states and links as methods of changing state, but that's largely unimportant here.
PR is determined before any searches are made, and can largely be considered 'passive.' The active portion of determining a page's SERP position I've labeled as relevance, but is more like a group of related things that all look at how closely related a page is to the entered search.
There are a number of important things to consider here...
Meta tags are the simplest. You know how more or less every page is built with HTML? Well, the very top of the HTML on every page is the <head>, and the <head> contains the meta tags. These tags tell people things about the website - what releases of certain things it uses, what character set it uses, and, most importantly for our discussion, a description of the site and a set of keywords related to the site.
The description and keyword meta tags are one of the most important things one can do to increase a page's SERP position.
Outside of this, just making sure that your content contains important keywords related to what you're talking about, ensuring fairly constant content updates, and trying to make content that is quality are all important.
Simple Techniques
Some simple techniques then...
Link to things within your own site, from your own site. This can and will increase your PR.
Post about and link to your site from other sites and/or get other people to come to your site and create some content, with links going back and forth.
Continue to update frequently.
And, finally, add some meta tags. This is the most in-depth step, so I'll provide some instructions...
1) Find a way to edit your page's HTML. If you're blogging, you should be able to find this fairly easily in an area where you'd be editing your template, layout, or somesuch. For other sorts of pages, you'll have to talk to the person who made the site and/or your host.
2) Find the first <head> tag. This indicates the beginning of the head portion of your HTML code. It should be, unsurprisingly, near the top of the HTML.
3) You'll need to make a pair of lines to put your meta tags on, probably right below the <head> tag. Moving things around shouldn't make any different to the page's display and whatnot, so don't be afraid to do so so long as you're not deleting things.
4) Now that you have your two lines, you need to make your tags. Below are examples, although you'll want to change the description and keywords to things relevant to your own page.
<meta name='description' content='Your description here. Or not, if you're lazy.'/>
<meta name='keywords' content='keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keywordPi...'/>
5) Bask in your own glory. Or not. Either way, you're done.
Assuming you don't already have meta tags setup, this should make a big difference in how much traffic your site gets from search engines - particularly Google, since it's the big man in the search engine market.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading, leave your comments below, you can subscribe via email to the right, and tomorrow I hope to get back into the economics.
Pun of the Day: Why was the homeless man wet on a sunny day? Because he was a pour businessman.
Link to things within your own site, from your own site. This can and will increase your PR.
Post about and link to your site from other sites and/or get other people to come to your site and create some content, with links going back and forth.
Continue to update frequently.
And, finally, add some meta tags. This is the most in-depth step, so I'll provide some instructions...
1) Find a way to edit your page's HTML. If you're blogging, you should be able to find this fairly easily in an area where you'd be editing your template, layout, or somesuch. For other sorts of pages, you'll have to talk to the person who made the site and/or your host.
2) Find the first <head> tag. This indicates the beginning of the head portion of your HTML code. It should be, unsurprisingly, near the top of the HTML.
3) You'll need to make a pair of lines to put your meta tags on, probably right below the <head> tag. Moving things around shouldn't make any different to the page's display and whatnot, so don't be afraid to do so so long as you're not deleting things.
4) Now that you have your two lines, you need to make your tags. Below are examples, although you'll want to change the description and keywords to things relevant to your own page.
<meta name='description' content='Your description here. Or not, if you're lazy.'/>
<meta name='keywords' content='keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keywordPi...'/>
5) Bask in your own glory. Or not. Either way, you're done.
Assuming you don't already have meta tags setup, this should make a big difference in how much traffic your site gets from search engines - particularly Google, since it's the big man in the search engine market.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading, leave your comments below, you can subscribe via email to the right, and tomorrow I hope to get back into the economics.
Pun of the Day: Why was the homeless man wet on a sunny day? Because he was a pour businessman.
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