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 Illustration by Tom Klein
by Tom Klein
Most people think about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) solely as an exercise to increase the amount of external links to their pages. I call this the Link Equity strategy where the goal is to accumulate and hold on to as many external links over time as possible. The logic behind this is simple: the more links to a page, the better it ranks; and while Link Equity certainly is a very important piece of an SEO campaign, it alone is not enough. It must be balanced with a consistent effort to create and maintain SEO quality pages.
Building SEO quality pages is an art of balance between form and function. It's about creating a great looking design while preserving the site's semantic structure in such a way that web crawlers can easily scan content and derive meaning and intent. SEO Quality pages can help to focus Link Equity by ensuring that every external link points to pages that have clear, consistent, and dependable content.
To truly understand SEO quality pages, we must first look at the intent of a search engine. Its primary goal is not to help the content provider get their website found - that's really a side effect. The true goal of a search engine is to deliver useful content of the highest quality to its customers - the public - the ones who make the searches. The search engines therefore want to ensure that search results always yield relevant, high quality links. Above all else, search engines want to avoid file-not-found dead links. So search engines prioritize quality websites that will not give back errors, and that will consistently deliver the content that they claim to have.
Consequently, quality sites that follow the rules get a higher ranking and show up higher on search results than the sites that are perceived to be low quality or spamming websites. The "trick" to SEO then is to become one of the high quality websites that follows the rules and is considered a reliable source of valuable content. Here are what I consider to be be the twelve most important rules for increasing the SEO quality of your website:
12 Rules for Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking
| 1. | Have great original textual content. Without great content, don't expect your site to rank higher than another site that does. Each of your pages should have at least 200 words.
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| 2. | Make sure your page delivers words as simple html text, and not an image of words or a flash file with words in it. Search engines crawlers wonn't read photos and currently are not good at looking at flash files. We have seen very beautiful flash websites that barely show up in search results because the crawlers can't find content.
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| 3. | Use a sitemap. A sitemap is a list of files that you want webcrawlers to search. A sitemap is not required - the reality is that webcrawler can find content on your site by navigating links just like a person. But a sitemap is considered something that higher quality websites have, and thus you should have one too. There are tools that can create sitemaps for you, but be careful. Make sure you edit a sitemap generated by a tool. Make sure you are only listing your best content rich pages. Also make sure that you are not listing a file that you do not want the public to find (such as a maintenance file or backup file).
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| 4. | Use a robots.txt file, but use it sparingly. The purpose of the robots.txt file is to request that crawlers don’t index parts of your site. This is done so that crawlers don’t waste your system resources indexing portions of the site that have no useful content. Most crawlers will abide by the robots.txt request, but some will not. Robots.txt is not intended to be a security tool. It will not keep users out of pages and directories. In fact, a robots.txt file is a good way for hackers to find out the names of directories. Many sites don't need a robots.txt file, but having one is thought to increase page ranking. So a lot of sites put up a simple "welcome mat" robots.txt file with just two lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
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| 5. | Avoid broken links. They can do a huge amount of damage to your ranking. Set up a quality assurance process that checks for broken links across your site every time you make a change to a page. Never change the URL for a page once you create it. If you must delete or change its name, make should you redirect it.
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| 6. | Make sure there is only one unique URL for each page. Even slight differences in a URL can make a search engine conclude that your content is not unique because it appears on multiple pages.
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| 7. | Avoid masked URL redirections. If you have three domain names redirecting to a single main website, make sure that the main website's URL is always the one that shows in the browser. Don't try to trick people by displaying the initial URL that they typed and making them think you have multiple web sites. This will make crawlers think that your content is not unique.
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| 8. | Create more internal links to within your site. While not as valuable as external links, internal links can increase your ranking. Having multiple internal links to a page suggest that you believe the page is valuable.
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| 9. | Discover the best target words for your website. It's tough to optimize your content for high traffic if you don't know what the most searched words are. We are not suggesting that you pander to high traffic key words. But we are suggesting that you should try to figure out which key words on your site are the most popular, and the accentuate those words. A great way to find the best words is by starting a small paid search campaign. This will allow you to quickly see which key words perform the better than others.
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| 10. | Make sure your target words are consistently in your title, description, headers, and main content. The idea is that the title of the site should match the description, which in turn should match the headline, which should accurately describe the content. All of these should have your target keywords in them. There are some subtleties involved with this one - too many to describe here.
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| 11. | Put meaning into your URL. We recommend that you use dashes to separate words in path names. Also, remember that each page should have its own unique URL. We recently reviewed a client's site that used the same exact URL for each menu choice. The though this look nice from a design perspective. Unfortunately, the search engines will think you have one page on your site, and they will not properly index your content.
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| 12. | Decide whether or not to use WWW in your URL, and then enforce your decision. I prefer my sites to have the WWW in the URL. If someone types my domain without it, I put it in for them. This way, all my external links are for http://www.tomklein.com and not http://tomklein.com. It doesn't matter if you use the WWW or not. What is important is that you enforce consistency - use one or the other. This eliminates complications in having two slightly different URLs with the same exact content. One potential problem with allowing both is that it can dilute your Link Equity because half your links contain the WWW, and the other half does not.
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Remember, good SEO is about a doing a dozen seemingly small things that add up to make a big difference. Also, be patient. You won't see immediate results when you make these changes. In fact, sometimes your ranking will drop before it rises. When the search engines return and find things that are different, sometimes they need time to digest it.
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