SEO: snakeoil or savior?

Snakeoil

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, for short is the technique of making your website appear attractive to web search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. There’s lots of SEO experts on the web, and they all offer to solve your problems in a trice…for a fee. But…

Is it really that hard?

No it isn’t. While there are technical solutions to the SEO problem, there are simple, relevant things that you can do on your site to improve your search rankings.

Content, content, content

Arguably, the most important element of your SEO strategy should be to produce relevant, succinct content. This content should be targeted at your readers and be relevant to your business or website.

Keywords

Keywords are the main points of your article. Your keywords should by used in your title and subtitle. Not only is this good copywriting, it flags to the search engine (and humans) the main points of your text.

You should also consider the category and tags for your post as keywords. Not only will this help people navigate your site, they will appear in the URL of your posts and pages. Which has SEO benefits.

Style text with semantic markup

Semantics matter

When writing your post you need to markup your content semantically. What does this mean? it means that your text needs to be machine readable as well as easy on the eye. Search engines use robots to crawl the web and index content. These robots understand HTML.

When you use the H1 tag to indicate a heading, the browser, robot and the human reader understand that the text between the H1 tag is a top level heading. When you just make the text bold, slightly larger and, say, green, the human may understand that you are indicating a heading, but the machines will not.

The other relevant, but slightly tangental point here, is that the look of your text and the meaning of the text are divorced. Modern browsers use cascading style sheets (CSS) that control the font, color, spacing and other graphical elements of the layout. In the CSS file are definitions for how to render headings, paragraphs, quotes, etc. If you override the CSS by formatting tools like making text larger, and different colors than the theme’s stylesheet, you are impacting upon the readability and professional look and feel of your site. This is in addition to bumping you down the search results…

Being semantically correct has benefits for your business. Prettifying text by focusing on form, rather than correct markup gives you bad SEO and drops you down the search result ranks.

Set an images Alternative Text Attribute

Describe your images

When you upload and insert and image into your post or page, it pays big SEO dividends to describe in words what your image shows. The other benefit is that you provide a description for vision impaired readers. Their screen reading software will read them the ALT tags. Thus helping you comply with accessibility law of many countries.

So when uploading an image use the alternative text tag and the caption tag to give a written description of the picture. “IMG0023.jpg” is not good enough.

The bottom line is that Google and other search engines pay attention to the ALT tags in images and boosts or penalizes your score appropriately.

On Brellabee (and WordPress) when you upload an image you can specify the image’s title, ALT tag and optionally give it a caption.

The devil is in the detail

• Keep your text short and to the point
• Use keywords for headings, tags and categories
• Use correct HTML markup to distinguish elements of your story
• Use the ALT tag to describe your image in words.

It doesn’t have to be rocket surgery to get good organic search engine results. Following these few simple rules can boost your rankings in search engines.

Brellabee is built on WordPress, and thus has excellent SEO features. Additionally many of the themes available through Brellabee have specific SEO options.

Credits

Snakeoil image from tellumo‘s Flickr Stream. Used under a Creative Commons Share Alike License