Web Presence Help
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If you want people to be able to find your site, you want to stay on Google’s good side. That means keeping the GoogleBot happy. Happy, in this case, means that their ’bots can crawl your site (in English: their computers can read it).

But that does’t mean you should write for the bot. As I said in the last post, Google is very motivated to read sites the way the user reads them. The bot gets better and better at thinking like a web site visitor. If you write for the visitor instead of trying to game the system, you’ll find Google’s algorithms (or search programs) will improve, in your favor, over time.

Search Engine Friendly Design is Well-Organized

Search engines like what people like. Clean, well-organized content that is relevant to the topic they’re searching for.

While some browsers will display content in an attractive format even if it’s not well organized, the best way for visitors and bots to discover your content is to serve it up according to web standards, and organized in a way that doesn’t require browsers to guess what you mean.

Here are some specific ways to make your structure search engine and visitor friendly.

Use html tags that clearly identify the content.

Use header tags for headers, instead of just making the words bigger. This lets browsers, and people, understand the document structure.

Use alt text in your image tags, to help users who can’t see the images know what’s going on, and coincidentally to help search engines understand what your page is about.

Keep it simple.

Use text links rather than images, whenever possible.

Do you really need javascript?

Use flash sparingly, when it really helps. Not for the whole site, or for navigation.

Make a sitemap?

To be honest, this is the one case where you need to coddle Google. If your navigation systems are clean and well-structured, you don’t usually need a site map for visitors. You shouldn’t need one for Google, either, but they encourage you to submit one anyway. Why? Because it lets them know how you intend for your site to work. They can compare that map with how the site actually works, and help you discover errors to fix.

Check out how your web site appears with javascript, java, and flash turned off. View it without images—ideally, in a bare-bones browser like Lynx. Your site should work just fine with none of the bells and whistles. That way you know that both people and bots can access your content easily.

Be Precise, and Clean Up Mistakes

Who likes trying to use a web site and finding it broken? Take time to look for mistakes, and fix them. Use web tools like those provided by Google to find the sneaky ones.

Fix broken links.

They drive visitors crazy, and they drive bots crazy too.

Be very transparent.

If your site is about selling motorcycles in Vermont, you don’t want to attract a visitor who is planning a Hawaiian vacation. You want to attract visitors who are actually looking for content like yours. (As it happens, Google wants this too. Otherwise they look stupid.) Make sure you have meta tags for page description and keywords, and make sure they are accurate and clear.

Have a Site Worth Visiting

Hands down, the most important thing you can do to get a high ranking on search engines is to provide value to visitors. I can’t stress this enough. It’s really all about content.

Content that users can find and access is what your web site is all about.

To learn more about writing web content, come back next week, or choose one of these options.

• follow us on twitter
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SEO (search engine optimization) is big news all over the internet. You can download e-books that promise to give you the inside story, or hire an expensive guru who has “the secret to SEO” all figured out. But the real secret is something the gurus don’t want you to know.

Why SEO matters

When you put a web page up on the internet, it dosen’t accomplish anything unless people can find it. If you want visitors to come and see your creation, you have to let them know about it.

Google is the first place many people go when they’re looking for something online. (Other search engines are important, too, but they work much like Google.) If the search engine can find you when people type in, say “Landscaping in Eugene, Oregon” your web site will be much more effective.

So search engine optimization, or SEO, is about increasing your visibility to search sites like Google. If search results for a particular phrase find your page among the first few listed, you’re likely to get more traffic (visitors) to your site.

The “Secret” to SEO

The real secret to SEO is that there’s no mystery, no trick. Despite stories you may hear to the contrary, it’s not about tricks and games. it’s about creating the kind of web site that people want to use.

To me, discovering this was a big relief. Tricks strike me as a little deceptive, and scary. The idea that I could get results without resorting to those tactics… whew!

Get Rich Quick Using Google!

There was a time when people were able to cheat Google and other search engines to place higher in the search results. They’d do it by putting a whole bunch of “keywords” on a page–more than any human reader would need to see. Sometimes, they’d make the keywords invisible to human users, but the “bots” (or “spiders”–computers that scan the web for sites like Google) could see them, and would be fooled.

Some people made a lot of money online this way, for a while. But before long, Google and the other search engines were on to them. The tricks stopped working. More tricks were crafted, but this time, Google caught on even quicker.

It got harder and harder to game the system. In fact, some sites were banned entirely from Google for trying.

In the end, these methods simply can’t win, and here’s why.

The good guys win

Google wants to do one thing well. They want to give people the results they’re looking for when they do a search. They want searchers to be really happy about what Google hands them. If searchers get results that aren’t satisfying, they won’t continue to use and trust Google.

And the thing is… Google is really good at getting what it wants.

So what they do is to continually get better at evaluating whether a web site is what a visitor wants to see. Yes, they do use rules, but the rules become more complex, and, luckily for us, more realistic.

This means that instead of worrying about whether exactly 7.3% of the words one your website are the keyword you think people will search for, instead of buying inbound links from unscrupulous “link farms”, you can worry about creating the web site your customers want to see, and count on Google to do a pretty good job of noticing it.

If your site provides good information, presented well, and it’s the kind of site searchers are looking for, Google wants to find it.

More resources on SEO

Learn more about being search-engine friendly

Google’s support pages have this great article on Search Engine Optimization. You can also find out more on Wikipedia’s page on SEO.

Coming soon: Specific strategies for real SEO.

Come back here next week for some specifics about:

• search-engine-friendly design
• keeping the bots happy
• how a site-map can help
• writing for the web