Zenologue

Search engine optimization relies heavily on the concept of links. After all, the modern mental picture we have of the World Wide Web is of a mass of interconnected pages, connected to other pages like neurons in our brains. Without links, there would be no web; only a loose connection of unrelated documents, and navigation around the web would be impossible.

The web, tangled as it is, is therefore a world based on back scratching. The hyperlink was one of the first tags to be invented when HTML was first developed, and it has changed little since then (see http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/ for more information). Hyperlinks simply link one piece of text to another by allowing the user to click on the appropriate text (or image or almost anything else these days).

Where Am I?

It didn’t take too long for the web to become a big place, with people adding new pages at a prodigious rate. But then came the problem that folks wanted an easy way to find their way around, a map of sorts, to let them find specific information they were looking for. At the time, it was like being in a library with no librarian and no index of the bookshelves.

Enter the mighty search engine. The search engines began to catalogue the web by crawling from page to page, following any links they found, to move on to new pages. A primitive index was born and then it was enhanced to rank the entries for given keywords by relevance.

One of the key indicators of a page’s relative importance is the number of links that point to it from other pages, based on the premise that no one is likely to link from their page to another if they believe it’s irrelevant to what they’re saying. It would be like me adding a link from here to information on the genetics of giraffes – Interesting, perhaps, but hardly relevant to the subject of SEO.

So, the more incoming links a page has, the more important it must be. This is why having other pages link to your web site is a great way to increase your ranking in the search engines.

Google and the other search engines then decided to measure the number of links to a site with the actual text contained in those links to determine the relative value of each link.

For example, if you’re a portrait photographer with 100 links to your site, then the text for those links might say, “click here”, “photographer” or “portrait photographer”. The search engine index will count how many times each keyword is used in links to your site, so that when someone searches on “portrait photographer”, you will be listed in accordance to how many of the links to your site have those keywords in them.

Conclusion:

The obvious conclusion is it makes sense to ensure that all the links to your site have the same text in them, and to make them as specific as possible. If you’re a portrait photographer in Chicago, then request other webmasters to link to your site with “Chicago Portrait Photographer” as the link text instead of a simple “click here”. The search engines will then associate those keywords with your site.

If you want to see this in action, go to Google and search for the phrase “click here”. The first one in the search results is get.Adobe.Com, yet I don’t think you will find the words “click here” on their pages. The reason is that there are literally millions of web pages out there with the words “click here” pointing to get.Adobe.Com in order to download the Acrobat reader program and other software. The search engines have therefore associated the words “click here” with Adobe.

So, the next time you exchange links with another web site, remember that having meaningful and relevant text in the links that point to your site is a major way to help increase your search engine ranking.

SEO search engine optimization, SEO

We already talked briefly about the “keywords” meta-tag and how it isn’t really that useful these days when it comes to the process of search engine optimization. Now, we can take a look at one of the meta-tags that actually is useful – the “description” tag.

Perhaps you haven’t even heard of the description meta-tag before or, if you have, you may not think you’ve seen it, but I’m willing to bet that you have – you just might not realize it!

Every time you perform a search in Google, for example, you should see a page of results, each one with a heading you can click on to visit the site in question.

Underneath the heading is some additional text that gives you a basic idea of what you might see if you visit the page – that’s the description meta-tag in action. So, if we perform a search on “Golden retriever groomer”, it makes sense that we’re going to be more interested in those search results that actually mention dog groomers who groom golden retrievers than those who only groom poodles.

The description of each listed page therefore helps us to make the decision as to which link we’re going to click on. So, it makes good sense to ensure that each page of your web site has a good description meta-tag that’s relevant to the content on the page. This doesn’t have to be too long, but it should be enough to give the reader of the search results a reasonable idea of what your site is going to show them.

Important note: Do make sure that the description is relevant to the content – nothing will frustrate your readers more than tricking them to visit your site only to find it’s about something completely different!

The meta-tags are found in the header section of the web page, and might look something like this:

<HEAD>
<META name=’DESCRIPTION’ content=’Dog grooming by Jane for golden retrievers. Other dogs also groomed. Check out our testimonials.’ />

So, take a journey through the pages on your site and check out your own description meta-tags, and tighten them up to give prospective site visitors the right reasons to visit your site.

SEO search engine optimization, SEO

One of the questions I see often is “What keywords should I use in the meta-tags on my web page?”

The answer to the question, oddly enough, is actually “None.” Keywords, it seems, really might be extinct. But why?

In the early days of the world wide web, when web search engines were in their infancy, before the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” had even been thought of, the folks who set the standards for HTML coding decided that it might be a good idea for each web page to contain some useful information about itself.

This meta-information, they reasoned, could be used to identify the page, tell us something about what it’s about, who wrote it, how often it’s updated, and what keywords it ought to be indexed on. It sounded terribly useful, and I’m sure it came under the general heading of “good idea” at the time.

This information has become known today as meta-tags and you can see them in action on almost any web page, if you examine the page source and look in the header section.

At the time, the search engine developers were excited about it, and totally embraced the idea of using meta-tags in web pages. This information promised to make their lives easier, as they provided a standard and simple way of identifying the key information on a page.

For a while (probably a very short while), everything was great – but the honeymoon didn’t last long…

Eventually, the time came when the best things about HTML were meta-tags and the worst things about HTML were meta-tags.

Something the human race really excels at is abusing ideas and concepts and putting them to ill-advised use. I believe it was Albert Einstein who once said something like:

“If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar power years ago.”

So, as with all good things, people soon found ways to abuse meta-tags to the point where they became all but useless to the search engines. Unscrupulous web writers found that, by adding many and often irrelevant keywords to the meta-tags, they could fool the search engines into thinking their pages were really important, thereby raising them to the top of the search list.

So, the war began…

…with the search engines committed to producing a fair and accurate index on one side – and the over-zealous web programmers on the other side, constantly trying to outwit the search engines in order to propel their site to the top of the search results.

After a time, Google et al decided to give up using the keywords from the meta-tags in favor of analyzing the detail on the page itself to determine keyword relevance for that page.

So, in a nutshell, keyword meta-tags are no longer very important (I certainly don’t use them in any of my pages) and they can be safely ignored, at least for the moment.

However, there is still at least one meta-tag that is important – the “description” meta tag, which will be the topic of the next post on this subject of search engine optimization.

SEO search engine optimization, SEO