At The Whiteboard
SEO 101
Hi, I’m Laura Lippay, SEO Specialist at CNET Networks in San Francisco. Today we are going to talk about SEO 101. SEO is short for search engine optimization and what that is is trying to get your pages and your site to rank high in search results. First let’s talk about site structure. Let’s say we have a website about mechanical pencils. We have two different brands and three different styles. This page right here has six different things to optimize work: mechanical pencils, brand A, style 1, Brand B, style 1 and style 2. There are a lot of things you’re optimizing for on this page so your topic is a little bit diluted. What we want to do is break this up into separate topics.
This, the mechanical pencil page, instead of having all of your information here on this page, let’s put a little bit of an overview about mechanical pencils, the overview page. Then we’re going to break this down. Here we have a Brand A page. This is about Brand A, we’ll mention style 1 here. Here we have a Brand B page which is about Brand B and we have style 1 and style 2 mentioned here. To break it down even further, here we have a page for Brand B and style 1, a very targeted page. So let’s say we have somebody out there that’s searching for Brand B, style 1. What we want them to do is to go straight to this page. That’s what they’re looking for, that’s what we want them to find.
Number two, link relationships. The web is a very social place and for the search engines to see this, what they’re looking for is the relationships that you have between other sites and the relationship that your pages have between other pages. So what they want to see is that people are pointing to your site. Let’s say for this example, we have site A which is Joe’s website about cameras. Then we have site B which is CNET. Site A might have Betty’s site linking to it, his dad’s site linking to it, the camera store on the corner linking to it. CNET might have CNN linking to it, MSN, News.com, Dell and HP. Because these sites are big sites out there on the web, they give a little bit more importance to the CNET site than a smaller site like Betty’s site, Dad’s home page, the camera store on the corner.
Number three is content. What you want to have is quality content and original content. The more quality content you have, the more people are going to naturally link to your site, the more people are going to come to your site. Original content. Try not to steal everyone else’s content. You can use RSS feeds but make sure you have your own original content on the page tier which is good for users and it’s also good for search engines.
Number four, information design. Where the content is on your page is important as well. What search engines do is they try to discern what they consider noise from the actual content so in a traditional kind of layout that you have here, we have advertising here, a lot of times we’ll have the navigation here and a lot of times we’ll have the marketing here. Then you’ll have your main content right here in the middle. Let’s say you have a website about mechanical pencils. Where you want to have mechanical pencils mentioned and where you want to talk about it on the page is up here, not really here and not really down here because if you have these three pages that are all talking about mechanical pencils—it’s mentioned here on this page and it’s mentioned here on this page. This page is likely to rank higher given that all other things will be the same.
Number five is code. What you want to try and do is have light clean pages, light clean code. What I mean by that is link to Java Script, link your CSS and keep as much clutter out of the code as possible. The other thing that you should know is there are two different types of SEO. We have white hat SEO and we have black hat SEO. White hat is doing SEO using a lot of usability, keeping the user in mind, trying not to do any tricks, what we call search engine tricks or search engine spam. Black hat SEO is you can do these tricks for the search engines that will get you high results but they will usually drop off after a while or you could also be banned and when sites are banned, it’s really hard to get them back.
Last but not least, traffic and popularity. If you have good content, a lot of people are going to be coming back to your site if it’s useful; if it is quality or has a lot of content, people are going to come back naturally. There are other things that you can do to try and get people to come back to your site. You can prompt people to bookmark your site. You can put out press releases, you can talk about what’s new in the industry on your site. You can also do blogs, do podcasts, anything that keeps people coming back for more. Also think about having people sign in and come in to do reviews or add their own content to your site to talk about rating things and forums and things like that.
These six points that we covered today are just a few of many, many, many things you can do for search engine optimization. One thing you want to remember is that you always want usability first. This is what the search engines are looking for, user friendly pages and a lot of times if I’m weighing, “Should I do this for SEO or should I not do this for SEO?” I think about it, usability, what’s the best user experience and I go in that direction.
