ocPortal Tutorial: Improving your search engine ranking
Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts
For most web sites, it is important to draw in visitors. There are many ways to do this, and one of these ways is by improving your site's 'findability' in search engines; this includes presence in the results for keywords appropriate to the visitors you wish to attract, and your actual position in the displayed search results.It is worth noting at this point, that it is my view that search engine ranking is only one small part in the 'visitor equation'. There are many ways to attract visitors, including:
- having a good domain name for the subject matter (e.g. buyspoons.com for a company selling spoons)
- having a domain name that people can easily say and remember (e.g. amazon.com, ebay.com, yahoo.com, google.com, microsoft.com - note they are all two syllable, and 'flow' and/or relate and/or bring up imagery)
- having a URL that is given out directly or close-to directly, such as a business card, or a sign.
- Internet banner (or similar) advertising
- 'placement' of your URL in a prime location, such as in a directory, or made available by someone who has it in their interest to 'pipe' users to you.
- On-line or off-line word-of-mouth, either by you, or by your visitors
- Quality of content, such that your site becomes the place to go
- associate your site with an official cause. A site which is somehow the natural place for people following this cause, will naturally get more hits.
Table of contents
How web crawlers work
Search engines work via one of four techniques (or a combination):- manually maintained directories (e.g. Google uses the OpenDmoz directory)
- accessing databases (e.g. Google uses Wikipedia)
- web crawling (e.g. Google has one of the best web crawlers)
- aggregation/taking of data from other search engines (e.g. Yahoo used to use Google)
A web crawler is a tool that will automatically find websites on the Internet, via hyperlinks to them. The basis of the process is very simple:
- the web crawler starts with a set of pages it already knows
- the web crawler goes to these pages, and:
- indexes the page
- finds what hyperlinks are on the page, and remembers them
- stores the pages it has found in it's list of pages it knows, and hence these pages will themselves be crawled, and so on.
ocportal SEO options |
Techniques
There are a number of techniques that will improving your site's search engine status, some of which are supported with special ocPortal features. Some of these techniques are:- Use good, accessible and 'semantic' HTML, and lay-out your site in an accessible fashion. By default, ocPortal has support for the highest level of accessibility, and has perfectly validating HTML. By providing a well constructed site, search engines will be able to index your site more appropriately and thoroughly, and they may regard it more highly. It is a convenient parallel that accessibility features to help the disabled, also help search engines (especially site-maps and alt-text).
SEO options for ocPortal content |
- Set well considered meta keywords and descriptions for your site as a whole, and for individual items of content that you consider particularly important. Try to make it so that your content and keywords correlate: if your keywords also appear in your text, search engines are likely to strengthen their ranking of your site against them. ocPortal will try and automatically pick a list of keywords for any added entry of content if you do not specify them, but you should hand edit this list if you have time.
- Use good Comcode page titles. ocPortal will use page titles as a part of the actual title-bar title of your site, thus allowing you to get keywords into a prime position of consideration for search engine crawlers.
- Likewise, use good hyperlink titles
- Get keywords into your own URLs (the choice of domain name, the URL path, and the URL filename)
- Get your site linked to by as many sites as possible: the more popular the site's, the better. This is not just good for the obvious reason of getting hits from those site's, but will also make search engines think your site is popular (in particular, the google PageRank algorithm basically bases website popularity on the number of links it gets).
- Add your site to directories, including large directories of any kind of website, and small specialist directories relevant to your website.
- Submit your site to search engines; note that when you submit a site to a search engine, you are only giving it optional information, as they are designed to find web sites regardless of whether they are submitted or not. You might want to pay for a service that submits to multiple search engines for you, but be wary of this: search engines may mark these submissions as spam if your submission does not match that search engines submission policy (many of which in fact exclude submission from such bulk services). Note that some search engines require payment for listing.
- Don't waste your time submitting to obscure search engines.
- Do not 'cheat' search engines by making pages with a lot of hidden words: search engines will penalise you for it.
- Make a lot of good written content, so search engines have more to index against. Of course, this will also add to the quality of your site.
- Use the clean URL feature, as search engines will then see pages opened up with different parameters (to access different content) as separate. This means they are more likely to consider them separately.
- Use unlinked "landing pages" that are linked to from other websites. For example, you might make an article landing page that is linked to from a directory of articles. The purpose is to give search engines something extra and real to index without distracting your primary visitor flow.
There are many rogues and companies out there that will promise unachievable things when it comes to getting high search engine rankings: a site that a user would not want to visit and respect, is not going to be able to abuse search engine ranking schemes easily. Our best advice for this is that you should focus on quality, not cheating the system: quality is easier, and cheating will usually end up working against you.