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A beginner's guide to search engine optimisation (SEO)
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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It refers to a number of methods that can help improve your position in search results. So if you search for "blogging tips", well-optimised sites should appear higher in the results than the not-so-well-optimised sites.
There are some things you need to know, and some you don't - or some you shouldn't have to learn, anyway. I'll explain why in a moment.
Titles are very important.
The title of your site and the title of each page can make a big difference in how many people find your site through search engines. Titles that are too short, too long, or have too many words that aren't descriptive will not help at all.For instance, take a look at some of the titles I use for my Quick Tips series of posts. I could have called them Quick Tips #1, Quick Tips #2 and so on. Instead, I included a bit of info about the contents of the post using the title. Maybe they are a bit long, and maybe I should do the same with my weekly round-up post. But they're better than having a title along the lines of "Tips".
Use headers within your posts.
Not only does this make your posts easier to read, headers are picked up by search engines. If you can divide your posts into sections like I do, you may find that it helps your position in search results too.However, you must use the actual heading styles (if your editor provides them). Some sites simply make the text bold or change the font size to make certain text look like a header, when actually it isn't one at all. This won't be quite so effective as using a true header.
Use image descriptions.
I really wanted to illustrate this without showing you any code, but it's actually easier to use the code - so bear with me.Hopefully your editor allows you to add images to your posts without having to enter the code yourself. Either way, here's what the code for an image looks like:
<img src="url-of-image" alt="Image description" />
url-of-image tells your browser where the image is; Image description is displayed if the image cannot be loaded or someone views your site with images disabled (or they use a text-only browser). The description is also picked up by search engines.
Of course, how you do this depends on the system you're using. In my system, I click the image button and I'm asked to enter the image address. When I click OK, I then have to enter the image description.
But this is not a complete guide.
There's a very good reason why I have not listed a lot of SEO tips in this blog entry. I don't think you should have to worry about them unless you are writing your own blogging system. Let's look an example.Some systems allow you to choose the kind of URL you want to have for your posts. An unoptimised URL might look like this:
www.yoursite.com/blog.php?id=1
An optimised URL might look like this:
www.yoursite.com/blog/what-is-search-engine-optimisation
When I switched my blog from the first style to the second, I noticed that Google was doing a much better job of finding my posts.
So why would anyone want to use the first example? I've come up with two possible reasons.
- You don't want to be on the search engines at all. If this is the case, you can block search engines from going into your site at all, and you should be able to make your posts private.
- Preference. To be honest, if you want the first style, you probably don't know a lot about SEO. And that's OK. However, if you don't know about SEO, how are you able to make an informed decision about which URL style you'd like? If you know that the first style won't help your search engine ranking and you want your site to be picked up by search engines... why would you use a URL style that will hinder your progress?
If a system did this automatically, you wouldn't even have to think about it, and that's one less SEO-related tip that needs to be shared outside of the technical community. Some bloggers may be technical, but many are not, and most bloggers do not write their own system even if they are technical. So why do people need to know about this tip?
Maybe when choosing which system to use, it helps... but I don't think it should be a setting.
What do you think?
Do you know a bit more about SEO (having read my post)? Do you care about it?Do you think that some SEO-related options should just be a standard setting in blogging systems, instead of giving users the ability to turn something off that they don't realise could damage their search engine ranking?
Any further thoughts?
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Comments on A beginner's guide to search engine optimisation (SEO)
I would like to know more about SEO but most explanations just confuse me so much I give up. This was brilliant Ben! Thank you. You have a real knack for explaining stuff in a way that's understandable to those who really need help in these areas. I like the way you've just picked a few key areas that most people would be able to follow to help improve SEO.
I'd been told it's better to use the header tags for increasing my font size in "headings" but hadn't understood why until now.
Cellobella and Lightening - thank you both for your comments. I'm glad you liked the article, and that you found it useful. :)
This is the way SEO should have been explained by all those other guys who have been doing it for years, but have never got it quite right.
Hi Ben,
These are some good tips. Somehow you always make me stick around. Your posts are very accessible, clear and to the point.
One thing I noticed with Wordpress is the strange titles they use. Starting with your blogs name, followed by ">>" and ending with the title of the post. I just yesterday changed it so my posts would start with the posts title, followed by the category and ending with my blogs name. I also added 'movie' into the title, since it's not in my blogs name.
I was also looking into permalinks too. I read somewhere that in general permalinks don't rank higher. But I might have to try it. The problem is, I'm using this polling system and I might have to change a lot of the code before it will work. Also, a lot of links on different sites already use my old format. And I'm not sure if they work after changing to permalinks?
Well, thanks again for all your tips.
James
Arnold - thanks for the reassurance that what I'm doing is worthwhile. :) This is exactly why I started my blog.
James - thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure if WordPress has a way to redirect from one style of link to another. In theory it should always find your post somehow, but not being a WordPress user it's hard to know exactly what it does in this situation.
As for permalinks not ranking higher... well, technically speaking, a permalink does not mean "a URL with the post title included" by definition, but a lot of people consider the two to be the same thing. If you search Google you'll see that the words you search for are shown in bold in the search results. Words can be bold if they're in the page title, the page description, or the address of the page. You can still be found on search engines without post titles in your links, but it seems like you're more likely to be found if you have links with titles in them. Nothing is a guarantee though, of course, what with so many sites being on the web.
Thanks for the comments. :)
You're spot on about the naming of images and image descriptions. I know I'm guilty of just sticking one into posts without even bothering with creating a descriptive file name, let alone the alt tag. You've reminded me I need to be more dedicated to the finer details ;)
Hi Amy, thanks for the comment. The filename doesn't show up in my file download script - it is just file_download.php?id=1 - so I could improve that. The ALT attribute is very important. Definitely one to include. :)
Very informative post. Can you tell me how you switch your pages, from
www.yoursite.com/blog.php?id=1
to
www.yoursite.com/blog/what-is-search-engine-optimisation
Does web server see the second solutions as folder? Or you make folder and then default page with params?
Best regards,
Ukion
Hi ukion, thanks for commenting.
That was really just an example. What I have running on my site is as follows.
Non-optimised URL:
http://www.benbarden.com/view_article.php?id=1025
Optimised URL:
http://www.benbarden.com/view.php/article/1025/what-is-search-engine-optimisation-seo
Optimised URLs are built into the system I use - Majestic - which I wrote myself.
Basically, view.php looks at the URL and takes the following information:
- content type: one of article, file, area or user
- unique ID: in this case, the ID of the article
- title: the title of the page with special characters removed, spaces converted to hyphens, and all letters converted to lowercase
It is possible to do this without the view.php in the URL, but that would require modifying an .htaccess file. I'd rather keep it as simple as possible, so I removed this step. The result is that the URL has view.php in it, but I think it's a fair compromise.
I don't think Blogger/Blogspot allows you to do this. If you're interested in Majestic, please follow the above link for more information. There's a 60% discount if you move to Majestic from a hosted blog (e.g. Blogspot).
Hope this helps. :)
This is an excellent beginner's guide. I have a few people in mind I want to share this with. :) And, I learned some things too!
Thanks, Katherine! :)
Hi,
I really liked this article. For the first time someone has explained what the acronym SEO stands for... well maybe you're not the first but the first I've come across. :)
Didn't know the stuff about headers, and my titles could use some work but at least I've optimised the urls and use image descriptions.
Thanks
CB