Web Site Secrets
By Karen Kratz

Want to know a secret? Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not that hard. It’s tedious work, and it can take a few hours out of your day(s), but it really isn’t that hard. Here are some basic tips to help bring your web site up a few notches the next time search engines index your web site.

Search Terms
Know your search terms, and be realistic about them. If you are a restaurant owner and want to be found under “restaurant”, well good luck. However, if you are realistic enough to realize that restaurants is far too broad a term for your web site to be found under (remember, search engines index web sites from all over the world!), try constraining your search term geographically. In other words, try for the search term, “restaurant NC”, or use your home town, county, and/or state within the search. You could also add “bbq” if that is what your restaurant specializes in. Most savvy web surfers know that to find a business close by, they need to add at least the state’s initials to help reduce the search to the area in which they live.

Once you’ve got your main search term, use it yourself and see who pops up in the top five to ten listings. Look at their web sites. What are they doing that you are not doing? Work to incorporate these things into your site (but don’t plagiarize their content – a bit of a legal no-no on the Internet).

Relevance
Keep your content – that’s the text on your pages and your image’s ALT tags – relevant to your web site’s topic. Don’t try to fool the search engines, especially Google – they don’t like it and have been known to boot web sites off of their indexes when designers try to “cheat” the system.

If your site has a picture of someone sitting at a table (notice the restaurant theme here?) with a delicious looking dish of food in front of them, don’t use the image’s ALT tag to say, “Welcome to John Boy’s Restaurant”. Use your search term in a creative way that will help a computer’s screen reader inform any visually impaired person what the image is all about, “Great food is served up daily at John Boy’s Super Restaurant in Smallville, NC”. See how you’ve used “restaurant” and “NC” in the ALT tag? That’s all it takes.

Make sure you sprinkle your content with your search terms in a creative way that makes sense too. If you mention your restaurant’s name, make sure you add “restaurant” to the end. Don’t use “John Boy’s serves up good food”, instead use, “John Boy’s Super Restaurant serves up good food”.

RSS Feeds
These little gems work wonders at keeping your web site’s home page (or any page where you wish to use them) changing frequently enough to keep the search engines coming back to your site to index it more often. If you use content and let is sit and get stale, search engines will get bored and not frequent your site more often then about every six to eight weeks. RSS feeds can help change that.

The great thing is that you don’t even have to know how to program in XML to use RSS feeds. All you have to do is find a good RSS JavaScript interpreter program on the Internet and use it to create the code to place RSS content on your web site.

You can then go to news web sites everywhere (CNN, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) and search on RSS feeds. Once you find them, see what they offer and if it will be relevant to your page’s content - but more importantly, see if it will provide your web site’s users with something else to click on and keep them interested in your site. Feedzilla.com has a ton of topics to choose from.

Title and Meta Tags
A well known fact is that Meta tags are not as important as they used to be. This is not to say that they shouldn’t be bothered with, just that major search engines don’t use them like they used to. However, some SEO’s theorize that search engines may already be swinging that pendulum back and are starting to use them again. Not to mention that smaller search engines still use Meta tags. So jump in there and make sure yours are up-to-date.

Don’t overload your keyword Meta tag. Select no more than 25 search words or terms and separate each by commas. Each word or group of words, within a set of commas is counted as one. Make sure you place your most relevant search terms at the beginning of the keyword meta list. This places more emphasis on these words for the search engines.

Don’t overdo it with the description Meta tag. Use only about 200 characters maximum to describe what the page is about. Try to work in your search terms, but be sure it makes sense for the page because this is what will appear when users look your site up and see it in the indexes.

Make absolutely sure you use the Meta keywords and some from the description on your web page. The matching-up of these words is a good thing for search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Be sure to use your keywords in your title tag. Don’t overload this either. It should be kept simple. For instance, on the contact page for your web site you might use, “Contact John Boy’s Restaurant in Spivey’s Corner, NC”. See? You have used your keywords and you’ve stated that this is the contact page.

Be Nice
Always keep in mind that you should be a white hat designer (the good guys who play by the rules), not a black hat designer (the ones who try to cheat). This will stand you in good stead with the search engines and keep your site listed higher, longer.

There are other things you can do to help your web site move up in the search engines’ indexes, but if I gave those secrets away, then I’d be too big of a blabbermouth! By the way, try looking up “Web Design NC” and see whose web site is at, or near, the top of the result list.