Now Is A Long Time Too

Warning: Search Engine Optimisation is a black art. It’s so far from being a science that it comes out the far side, and sometimes starts looking like quantum physics. I know of one SEO practicioner in California who seems sane until you hear that he prays facing Google once a day. I’ve no idea if he’s serious; it has as much basis in reality as many techniques I’ve seen work.

The basic notion is that you need people to find your pages, and they do that in search engines. Search engines “like” or “dislike” particular factors in a page, and place them in the results for each search term accordingly. So you work out what those factors are, and build your pages to match.

Three Basic Rules:
1) Content Wins Again.
2) The Title Tag Comes Second.
3) Inbound Links Control The Rest.

I’ll expand on those now, and probably wander off on a few interesting tangents.

Content Wins Again

The search engines only care about text. You may have the best price, fastest shipping, most up-to-date news, but unless there’s a reasonable amount of relevant content on your page, you are not going to get anywhere. And the main thing that has to be in your content are the search phrases you want to be found on.

You can aim for maybe five to ten phrases for a given page - this is often called keyword loading. You’ll see mentions as well of keyword density, where someone has calculated that an optimal keyword density in your page about keyword density will get hits from search engine users looking for keyword density who want to read about keyword density. Yes, that sentence is intended to read badly; it’s what you get when you over-optimise your content, and even though it does sometimes trick the search engines, it annoys people. Don’t do it - annoyed customers don’t buy, click on ads, or the like, they just go somewhere else.

Here’s how to do it right: write your page text, ignoring any thoughts of keywords. When it’s written, look down along it, and pick out a few phrases people might search on. Think a bit about these, and come up with a few variations. Sometimes these will be easy - for “doctor who”, for instance, you can also think of “dr who”, “dr. who”, and bad spellings like “docter who”. However, someone might also search on “tardis man”, “time travelling doctor”, “scifi doctor scarf”, or any of a million other combinations. You need the ones that are most relevant to your content, and that people will be searching for.

Sometimes this is obvious, other times you need to resort to tools like Wordtracker, which tell you what search terms are in use, and suggest alternative ones. It will also do you the service of checking how mnay other sites are found using a given term. The free version only checks MSN; the paid one (you can pay for as little as a day’s access) checks all the major engines. I recommend it highly.

Anyway, you now have a list of relevant terms, and you know, or at least have a feeling for, which ones are better. Go through your text again, seeing if you can substitute some of the new ones for those that already exist, and if you can add others. Keep the text feeling natural - people are very good at spotting “artificial” text, and it puts them off.

You’re now done with that aspect. Pick one term that you think will get the best traffic - not the most, but the best - and go on to the second rule.

The Title Tag Comes Second

The title tag is in the head of your HTML document -