…but not as we know it! The imprecise art of search engine optimisation.

This site’s starting to look pretty sweet now, but I find myself getting way-laid by ideas. That next stylesheet, a piece of content there, a new link here. It’s getting quite excessive. Now I’m quite into the flow of building my site, I find I’m quite addicted to it. My next plan is to build an Admin tool for adding in links, then a gallery, then how to tie it all together.

It’s quite a learning experience too. I mean besides from learning PHP and MySQL, finding other pieces of content people might be interested in having read my site, pictures, people, places… it just goes on.

But, in building this new site, I’ve tried to address a problem I’ve always had, which is that my site never comes up in search engines if you type in my name. Now, as far as I can tell, there aren’t many Gregory Brine’s in the world. But, despite this, when I do a search, a lot of information about Shrimps comes up (the trouble with having Brine as a surname). This, unsurprisingly, worries me. A lot!

So, what am I doing to rectify this? Well, I’ve read just about every piece of information I can find on Google, Search.msn and various other places that might be able to help me get up there with the best. Basically, I’m not willing to use pay-per-click as this is not a commercial site, so what I’m doing optimising the content to make it search engine friendly. I’m also using the tools that the search engine’s provide, such as Google’s site maps, in an attempt to help it.

Optimising? How? What? In a nutshell, as far as I can tell, the first step to better ratings is to make the search engine work better when it reaches your site by making it as standard’s compliant as it can be. In my site’s case, I built the site to the W3C XHTML strict specifications, which you can validate on their website. All images have alt and title tags. The stylesheeets are fully validated. Even the RSS and ATOM feeds are fully validated to the latest specification (for anyone who wants to subscribe to them). I’ve also run accessibility checks, as opening the web up to as many people is an important part of the Web’s future, and a great way of seeing how well your site performs.

That’s good, but I think that’s only the start. Next up come some methods that have been around for a while, but either aren’t used, or people abuse them. Meta Tags. On this site, I’ve included every piece of information I can about my site, which the various engines will pick up, but I’ve tried to make them honest. Nothing’s repeated, it all says what it needs to. The title is well formed and uniquely identifies each page. There’s a description, a few choice keywords and, most importantly the robots and re-visit tags. So often people don’t include them, but if a search engine finds one of these, it’s like Charlie finding that Golden Ticket. It’s means the spider (that’s what the search engine uses), has a green card to look at everything it can find (or wants to look at). It also tells it to come back in however many days you say. These take a few seconds to add in, but can make such a difference!

Still not enough? Ok, then some good practices are to ensure that any page can be reached within 3 clicks of the homepage. This has the advantage of stopping the visitor from getting bored, and also prevents the Spider from getting lost. A fantastic way to do this, is firstly, think about the site layout, but also have a ‘Site map’ link on the homepage. It’s so simple, but so effective! One page that links to every other page on the site (with the exception of dynamic content such as blogs). This is also a major boon for accessibility as screen readers will pick it up.

If you still want more, then try Google’s site maps. This is a way to submit an XML file to them with every link in your site, how often that content changes, and how highly you rate it. Obviously, generating this XML file can take time, or you can use the free tool they provide. Or, if you have a bespoke content management system, you can generate this automatically and submit it to Google that way.

Send to a friend? The last trick is linking to other people (and hopefully them back to you). Part of what the spiders do is record any external links (other web sites) that they find. It then records that you’ve linked to them and, if they link back, it records that too. All this helps to improve your rating on the search engine as it suggests that your site is not on it’s own, but is part of a community. So, get your URL added to sites, profiles, whatever. But, and this is a big but, don’t be tempted to use those pay for link through schemes you hear about. The search engines monitor these, and it can result in you being black listed!

There’s still no guarantee this will all work, but I’ll be sure to let you know if it does the trick. So far, in looking at my site’s usage stats, the search engines and blog sites are starting to notice my site, and frequent them. I’m hoping this all helps me and anyone that reads this. And if anyone has any other tips, or feel what I’ve written is incorrect, please let me know.

Links:
http://www.w3.org/
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx

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