Web Development

Improving your site's search results: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

September 17, 2008 September 17, 2008 Whether you’re a business owner, hobbyist or the person in charge of a community website, you’ve likely gone through the effort of creating a web page for your cause. You may not be the technical person behind the effort, but now you’re sitting in the saddle, waiting for results. You know people should be visiting your site, but you can’t seem to overcome that visitor hurdle. Before you panic and hire a PR agent, ask yourself these questions: Is your site employing Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? When you type keywords related to your site into Google, Yahoo or any other search engine, do your results come out first? If the answer to either of those question is no, it’s possible that your site’s results could be organically improved without spending money directly on advertising. Here are a few ways to tell if you’re getting the most from your site: 1) Do page titles properly articulate what visitors might be looking for? You have a news story on your band’s website about an upcoming local coffee shop performance. Is the title of the page “Show November 1” or, worse, “Untitled”? Or is it “Joe’s Band Performs at Coffee Shop X November 1 in Waltham, MA?” 2) Building on the previous point, do the URLs to your site represent information about your page? Using the last example, is the URL to your page http://www.YourBandsPage.com/shows.php?id=24, or, worse, are you unable to link directly to stories/events? To be properly optimized, the site URL should look more like: http://www.YourBandsPage.com/Joe’s-Band-Performs-at-Coffee-Shop-X-November-1-in-Waltham-MA/24/ As a general rule, the more intuitive it is for you to figure out the content of a page by looking at the title or URL, the easier it will be for a search engine to “crawl” your site (find all of the pages) and “index” it (place it in its results). 3) Does your site have any friends? Networking and socializing aren’t just for people. Websites that are linked on other pages will see their results climb in search engines. This is because search engines aggressively scour the Internet, trying to make their results more complete than their competitors’. They do this by picking some starting points and then following all of the links they find. If your page keeps showing up in other locations, the crawler will know it’s popular. Naturally, there are many more areas to improve the organic search results, but taking care of these top three will set you in the right direction.