SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TIPS

February 16, 2007

Lori Goodman

With Wolfram Research (Mathematica) since 1999. Started as a note taker for mtgs. Seemed like an interesting company and that offered a foot in the door. After a couple of months I was told to learn html because the Web Group needed help mocking up pages. Read a book, and started mocking up pages. Now I manage the content for a number of our site and help manage projects for other Wolfram sites that aren't directly mine. Number of pages - hard to say - hundreds thousands. www, mathworld, functions... Big interest of mine is Search Engine Optimization. In a setting where I don't determine content I don't always get to apply everything I know, but try to use good practices as much as possible.

SEO

We concentrate on Google primarily. My notes will focus heavily on that. But the basics are the same across the board.

• Content is King. All people want and subsequently all search engines want is good content. Optimizing for search engines is the same as optimizing for readers. They both want relevant, high-quality content that's easy to navigate. So think about what phrases people are searching for and put those on your pages. You won't be found it you don't include phrases people will be looking for.
• But how to find what people are looking for? There are a number of free and pay resources available to help narrow down keyphrases
  • WordTracker is a paid tool that can help to look for phrases that are being searched. Wordtracker.com will even give indicators of competition for phrases. You can buy a one day subscription for $8.17. We have use WordTracker quite a bit. www.wordtracker.com
  • Overture.
  • Google now has its own,free keyword tool adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox.
  
  
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• content, content, content. Become an expert. Have a set of articles on a topic. Good way to get links in.
• Select 1-3 "right" keyphrases for the page's text. Think "phrases" not "words". Right = popular (but not too popular), appropriate for your target. What phrases are people using.
• Use the keyphrase multiple times (at least twice) in the page's text. Use the keyphrases naturally; don't just stick them in.
• http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php enter your website and see which words are used the most. If you're wanting to rank for a phrase, but it's not used on your site, you're not going to get traffic.
• Use the keyphrases also in the titles/headers of the page
• Use the keyphrases in the title bar
• Use the keyphrases in the meta descriptions
• Title tags should be different and descriptive on each page
• images - should have alt and title attributes- not only for seo but also user with images turned off and accessibility reasons
• use h1, h2, h3 tags. Can specify look in css
• high quality links into your site. count highly for Google - as does the text that is linked.
• interlink on your site too - linking to pages within your site is a way of giving them importance. The more pages on your site that link to any given page, the more important that page is deemed to be in the eyes of the search engines.
• images - use alts/titles - but know that they don't count as heavily as text.
• siteindex - have a siteindex linked from the front page - list all pages (or sections if your site is really big). This gives search engines an easy way to find all of your pages. Keep it simple. http://www.wolfram.com/siteindex.html
• meta keywords - not given any weight by Google
• meta descriptions - important. used as the description for your site by some engines.
  Pepsi Co spent big money for online Super Bowl site-related Ads leading people to SierraMist.com. Looks like that site needs one of the very basic SEO deliverables, however: a META description tag. Their #1 listing for the search "Sierra Mist" provides the following description: "Sierra Mist. Oops! Looks like your JavaScript is turned off. You must enable JavaScript to visit our site. Once you have enabled it, click here to refresh ..."
  
  One of the most acclaimed ads of the Super Bowl was the Emerald Nuts (EN) "Robert Goulet" campaign, which featured Robert sneaking into an office manned by tired individuals and generally wreaking havoc, only to be foiled by someone eating Emerald Nuts. Fun! However a search for "Emerald Nuts Robert Goulet" leads to zero listings for the EN domain on the top page. This is likely because all the EN site content is completely invisible to search engines. Again, not even a META description is used. In this unfortunate circumstance, the entire EN listing for a brand search at Google leads only to the domain, without any description at all. I suppose they should be thankful that they at least are #1 for the term.
• One of my goals is to make our Flash files more SE-friendly. Here's an interesting site that I've been sent http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr - gives alt-type info for Flash files
• Google's webmaster guidelines
• more Google guidelines - Gives suggestions for good design, content, and technical guidelines. Also gives examples of bad practices to avoid.

Resources

• highrankings.com - newsletter worth subscribing to
• searchenginewatch.com - the original SEO site under Danny Sullivan
• SEMPO - search engine professionals group http://www.sempo.org, training http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/training
• http://www.wdfm.com/publish/search_engine_optimization/index.htm - links/descriptions for 38 SEO tools
• New! Google AdWords landing page optimizer tool https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/siteopt/help/FAQ.html
• Firefox web devloper toolbar