Midnight Oil

Recently, I went to a meeting of the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs. They sponsored a presentation by John Sherrod of Primedia regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

All in all, it was a good talk, and I didn’t feel too sleazy for being there. I was worried that an SEO talk would devolve into discussions of how to fool Googlebot into putting you at the top of the list for keywords like ’stud’ and ‘teen.’ Luckily, John stressed one main point on how to best climb the charts: provide high quality, original content that has value to your readers.

Beyond that, he gave many good tips that are applicable across a wide variety of sites. I’ll list off the ones that I was quick enough to write down.

John’s Tips

Make sure your links are spider-friendly

When the search engine spiders reach your page, they will rely on you to navigate them around. The only way they can find their way to all your pages is if there are links providing navigation to the each page. Also important, these links should be text links, not flash. The text of the link helps the spider identify the keywords to associate with the material on the page. Further, some links are incomprehensible, such as Flash or Javascript links. The more plain text you have, the friendlier it is to the spider.

Avoid URLs with lots of query string variables

I can’t say much to this one, since I don’t know how the spiders work. John, however, claims that they do not like URLs with lots of query string variables. In any case, these URLs are definitely not friendly to users, and they look ugly in a search result. Instead, allow the URL to express some sort of organization of your site. For example, compare the following two URLs:

http://mysite.com/products/jewelry/gold/diamond-tennis-bracelet

http://mysite.com?cat=44&subcat=92&prodId=2412145

Which one is more descriptive? They could be talking about the same thing, but it’s impossible to tell from the URL.

In the Rails world, URLs like this are fairly easy to achieve, thanks to routing. By implementing a few routes, you are able to clean up your URLs and make them look nice and pretty. Take a quick look at the official manual on routing and you’ll see just how easy it is.

On Obsidian Portal, we are trying to use nice, easy to read URLs for as much as we can. Currently, we’re not doing as well as we could, but that’s mainly because we have so many features we’re trying to implement. Making URLs look pretty is not exactly at the top of the list. However, we have had some success with campaigns and game content. For example, http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/kensing takes you directly to my campaign, called Kensing. In another example, http://www.obsidianportal.com/game_contents/show/memory-steel, takes you to an item I created called memory steel. That URL could use some cleanup, but you get the idea.

Unique <title> tag on every page

The search engines place a lot of weight on the words they find inside the title tag. So, make sure every page has keywords in the title. Personally, I am not a big fan of long, jumbled titles that are just a mish-mash of keywords. Instead, give each page a meaningful title that happens to contain 1 or 2 keywords related to the material presented on the page. This will give it a nice appearance in the search engine result pages.

Establish a baseline for your current stats

Before you can get better at anything, you need to know where you currently are. For search engines and page views, you need to establish your current baseline and then track your stats over time. Probably the easiest way to do this is by setting up a Google Analytics account. It provides a nice graphical view of how you are doing over time.

use link: on your competition

This is an excellent strategy for finding out why your competition ranks better than you. Go to Google and enter:

link:your.competitors.site.com

This will return a list of all the links (that Google knows about) to your competitor’s site. You may discover that they have several high-ranking incoming links that could also apply to you. Track these places down and see if you can get yourself listed there as well.

New friends and plans for next month

Besides listening to the SEO presentation, I also met a few Ruby on Rails developers here in Atlanta. Calvin Yu and Neil Green are members of the ATLRUG (Atlanta Ruby Users Group) and they’re working on a new site, but they asked me not to discuss their project just yet, so I’ll keep it under wraps.

Next month’s meeting will be a round-table discussion of various web technologies (such as RoR). I cornered the organizer after the meeting and offered to sit in as a RoR “expert.” Just don’t tell him how little I know