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Addressing Search Engine Optimization

Since your site went up—or just since you bought the Web address—you’ve probably been getting spam trying to sell you “SEO” services. But if you start with a few key things, you’ll be well on your way. By Shawn Hazen

First, keep in mind that the search engine is looking at all the text content on every page of your site. To ensure that search engines find and like your content:

– Make sure that as much of your content as possible is live HTML text (as opposed to graphics or Flash) – Make that content relevant and robust

There are a couple of things you can do that will really help Google out, though.

1. Boil down the main subject of each page into a succinct phrase. Keep in mind the keywords and phrases people will be searching to find sites like yours.
2. Use this phrase for the page title, the heading displayed along the top of the actual browser window.
3. Use a variation of this phrase as the heading within the page itself, enclosed in the code’s H1 tag.
4. Give the file for the page as descriptive a name as you can, like marketing_trends.html instead of just numbers or abbreviations. This is a more minor thing, but it still helps!

Some of our clients still spend an inordinate amount of time fretting over keywords for meta tags embedded in the code. These days, the strategies mentioned above will serve you much better. However, it’s still worthwhile to write a good meta description for your page. It won’t affect your search page rankings, but it may be displayed on search results pages and can affect people’s first impression of you.