Some General SEO Guidelines, Content Relevance is King!

18 Apr 2011

SEO

What is SEO? Content relevance is king!

This question has been asked many times, however SEO can be summarised as:

"Structuring content, code, and associated in such a way to improve visibility to search engines."

- Carl Belle, 2011 (or Care Belle if you're my doctor who can't spell for some reason)

Relevance

Back in the old days, when we only sent emails using round letters for fear of the pointy ones (such as k or z) getting caught in the wires (which, just like an S-bend, could clog up the Internets with a massive electronic dump), and when putting a camera or a phonograph into a telephone you could actually carry without requiring assistance from a team of gnomes was still considered extremely James Bond, big business finally woke up to themselves and stampeded like a horde of starved fatties towards a doughnut shop on the Internet in droves. They erected their websites without any consideration for what the end user might actually want or need, and they mostly ignored how content on their site was structured.

These were the same old days, when the Interwebs was steam powered, and webmasters were busy stuffing the titles, keywords, and descriptions of their websites full of stupid information that didn't really relate at all to the content in their page in an effort to appear in as many searches as possible. As the search engines of the day were as well mostly stupid (with the notable exception of Infoseek, may ye rest in peace), they lapped up all this information and combined it all into a giant, usable pile of poo.

Some brainy young chaps were obviously as frustrated with this as the rest of us were, and they set out to fix the situation by using their noodle and developing a search engine that actually worked. As they toiled away, they considered what the purpose of their venture was (as any good software engineer should), and arrived at the following conclusion:

"Relevance".

They named it Google, and the Internet was happy.

This upset big business, as their mostly brochure-ware, useless, sprawling websites now had to have its content categorised as their site was invisible to Google. They could have avoided this by building their sites with a shred of foresight and simple organisation, and out of those who failed to do so, a new niche within IT & T was born: SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation.

Relevance is an abstract concept that, like the Great Unwashed's 'taste' in modern popular music, cannot be generally be fathomed at all, however, unlike the Great Unwashed's ability to discriminate, most abstract concepts actually can be measured, the trick is finding the way to do so. One always walks the fine line when attempting to put numbers against something that is considered unmeasurable, so with that in mind, you can begin to imagine just how fantastic the modern search engines' algorithms are. In reality, the code probably isn't that clever, however the architecture, concepts, and execution of said is clever, very clever in fact.

Google themselves state that they currently employ over 200 signals when processing content within their database, so keep this in mind when writing your content: there is no silver bullet here, as generally not any one particular approach is going to work better than another. Developers love writing silver bullet solutions, but most of them are horrid and fall over, leaving behind an enormous stack of rarely used classes, 'loosely coupled' types that are actually tightly coupled through misuse of interfaces and the like, and generally poor architecture through nearsighted planning. Writing SEO content and presenting media online is different, the results can be almost immediately beneficial, however, get it wrong, and that sudden down turn in traffic could spell disaster for your site and associated revenue.

Some things to remember

All blabbering aside, here are some general check lists that I run through when writing copy, performing a site audit, or building SEO specific code.

• Find out what people are searching for! Don't build pages that people aren't going to search for, as there's really not much point!
• All copy on a page should point upwards, that is, all content on a page should support the title and meta description
• All copy on a page should relate as much as possible to each other, and point upwards (see above). If it's not relevant, piff it
• Serve content at one location only. This means: don't serve the same information at http://www.foo.com/foo.aspx?ID=1 and also http://www.foo.com/foo/a-category/. Don't serve content at http://www.foo.com/foo/ and http://www.foo.com/foo - these are considered different, as are http://www.foo.com/foo/ and http://www.foo.com/FOO/
• Serve content at one sub domain only. This means: don't serve content at http://www.foo.com/ and http://content.foo.com/
• Serve content at one protocol only. This means: don't serve content at http://www.foo.com/ and https://www.foo.com/
• Choose a URL formatting pattern and roll it out across your site. Replace puncuation with hyphens (although most people on the Internet don't know what a hyphen is), remove underscores, ensure the URL up to the query string is lower case etc.
• Create and execute a hard redirecting solution to ensure content is served only at one location
• Unique content is best - that means you write it yourself
• Hand write your on page copy, don't steal it from someone else
• Choose your page keywords and make sure they're represented in different combinations and permutation in your on page content within links, heading tags, and title attributes
• Include title attributes on all links and images. These titles should describe what the user will see should they follow the link
• Don't abbreviate! Abbreviations are awful, and don't help anyone out at all, ever. This is a general software rule, don't abbreviate because you're too lazy to type something into your IDE, always use meaningful, descriptive page/file/variable/class names. E.g., 'prodcat' might mean something to you, but it actually sounds invasive and a little painful to me, so how is an end user or a search engine going to work out that it means 'product catalogue'?
• Don't tie dates, dollar amounts, or times into your paths, especially if these are linked to product prices and the like
• Avoid use of bloatware such as jQuery. There's no point loading a whole library just to put round corners on things, do it properly, in design
• Don't ever put anchors within javascript onclick events. This is silly, and makes it difficult for a search engine to follow
• Ensure your navigation is clearly defined, easy to use, and lightweight in code
• Don't use nesting with HTML, it's simply not required, and will bloat the size of your page dramatically
• Try to reduce and consolidate references to external media resources. This means have two style sheets instead of 93, use sprites where possible, that kind of thing
• Page execution is important, especially if Google is visiting your site frequently - the smaller and faster the page is, the better for your users and the visiting spiders
• Move breakables to the bottom of your page. This includes javascript methods, libraries and the like. These nearly always get in the way of spiders, and can mess with the parsing process
• Ensure your code degrades gracefully. Remember that spiders won't always be able to navigate with the ease of a modern browser, so make sure you code for those cases when javascript or Flash is not available to the client
• Speaking of Flash, don't use it!
• Mixed media can be beneficial
• Research, research, research! Search engines are always fiddling with their algorithms, which is as naughty as it sounds. You'll need to keep an eye on what they're up to in order to stay ahead of the game. Watch your competition to see what and how their landing pages are performing
• Get Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools (or similar) set up with ever site you wish to track to ensure your pages are peforming. Even better, write your own! Contrary to popular belief, not everything you require from research tools has already been written!

And the main things to remember

• If it's good for your users, then it'll generally be good for your search engines
• Relevance is king, if your content isn't relevant, then reorganise it so it is