The Rank and File
Search-engine optimization starts with small tweaks.
By Glenn C. Jimerson
Let me be the first person to tell you that there is no single magic bullet that will put you into the top 10 of the major search engines. The key to search-engine optimization is making small incremental improvements that add up to make a page that search engines find relevant to a particular keyword.
How a search engine evaluates a page is a mystery. It's a well-guarded secret they are unwilling to share. No one knows exactly what the algorithm is, but we as Internet marketers do our best to come closest to hitting this moving target. This article is meant to present some basics to keep in mind when you are designing sites or trying to tweak existing sites to be more search-engine-friendly.
When it comes to optimization, everyone would like for their home pages to rank for every phrase under the sun. But trying to be a jack-of-all-trades instead of a specialist leads to shooting yourself in the foot. A page should be optimized for no more than three keyword phrases. Beyond that, it's difficult to make a single page relevant to all the phrases you want. It's better to break up the site and optimize individual pages for keywords.
Good SEO principles start at the code level. Remember the good old days of tweaking tables to lay out content on a page? Those days aren't gone, but a mostly (if not 100 percent) CSS design can keep your code from getting bloated. Some of us SEOs say the code-to-content ratio is important, since less code means the keyword-rich text will be more prominent to the spider. Keep in mind that spiders don't see Web pages the same way people do. Even if you don't buy the code-to-content-ratio theory, less code means faster loading times. A graphics-heavy tour can use any advantage it can get.
Meta tags used to have a special place in the SEO world. In the good old days, you could stuff a site's "keywords" and "description" meta tags like a Thanksgiving turkey and get a decent raking. But those days are long gone.
The "keywords" meta tag is no longer used for ranking purposes by any of the major search engines, and it can give away competitive intelligence by letting anyone looking at your code know what keywords you are optimizing for.
The "description" tag is still useful but not for ranking purposes. This tag is used as the blurb in the Search Engine Rank Placement to describe your site. It's the first opportunity to encourage a surfer to visit your site, so take some time to craft a good description. Make sure it's about 140 characters long, or it will get cut off.
So what tags are important? The "title" and "h1" tags are the two most important tags when it comes to ranking. Make sure to use the keyword phrase in them, but don't go overboard by trying to pack them with 50 variations of your phrase. Remember: Keep it to no more than three phrases.
<title>Large Natural Breasts | My Big Breast Site</title>
...
<h1>Large Natural Breasts for Big Breast Lovers</h1>
This is a rudimentary example, but it doesn't go overboard and any repetition will make sense to spiders and human visitors. I generally like to add the name of the site at the end of the title for branding purposes.
In addition to text, how the images are presented is another factor in a page's keyword relevance. The file names for images should be descriptive. For the "Large Natural Breasts" site in the previous example, "big-breasts.jpg" would be an appropriate file name for an image. Make sure to include the keyword in the "alt" attribute for the "img" tag. Don't use this naming convention and "alt" attribute for every image on the page. If you match the file name and "alt" text to the image's content, you should be fine.
Also, don't lock text into an image. It often is easier to slice up an image that contains text to preserve the font and formatting. Unfortunately, since spiders can't read the text in an image, the text will be invisible to the spider.
Finally, internal linking structures are an important factor in improving your site's ranking. As I mentioned earlier, it's best to not optimize for too many keywords on a single page. But this is not to say your site should not try to rank for multiple keywords. By using proper internal linking, you can make sure those internal pages have a decent chance of ranking for their intended keywords. When you link to another page, it's best to use your desired keywords as the anchor text. For instance, if your home page is optimized for "big boobs" and you also want one of the internal pages of your site to rank for "Asian big boobs," then a link from your homepage should look like this:
<a href="http://www.YourWebSite.com/Asian-big-boobs">Asian big boobs</a>
Notice how the directory and anchor text contain the desired keyword phrase. Throw in a matching "title" and "h1" tag, and you are on your way to better rankings for that phrase.
Those are just a few examples of basic SEO principles you can use to help improve your site's search-engine visibility. There are many other factors that go into ranking, but this should give you a few points to keep in mind when you are designing your next site.
Glenn C. Jimerson is the director of search marketing for Vista Web Media.
This article originally appeared in the July 2008 edition of AVN Online magazine. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscriptions.
