October 23rd, 2008
» Quick Tips: Simple SEO Enhancement
I’ve spent some time over the past week researching and trying to find simple ways to increase traffic to my website. Nowadays, even your average Joe (Joe Six Pack?) is creating a website for himself and trying to carve his niche in the online world. If you are one of the many people (like me) who decide to start their own blog or website, here are some very simple things you can do to help your search engine rankings.
First of all, I’d like to explain what SEO is. SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and is essentially “pleasing google”. SEO is designed to help search engines see your website and know there is content there. This is called “indexing”. SEO helps search engines index your website better.
One of the most important things you can do to help your SEO is to fill in your meta data. The meta data provides very basic information to the search engine about your website. It is written into the source code of your website and appears in the <HEAD> section of your code. So what does meta data look like?
- There are three important aspects to meta data: title, description and keywords.
- Make sure your website has a title and this title appears on every page. Look at your source code to find <TITLE> and fill in the title of your website there if it isn’t already there. Your title should be short and to the point.
- The description is a few sentences long and gives a very brief description of what you will find on your website.
- Keywords are very important. This is a list of words that are most relevant and best describe your website. A search engine will associate search results for those keywords with your website.
Here is an example of meta data:
<title>MatsieFTW!</title>
<meta name=”DESCRIPTION” content=”Mattie Kenny is a college student extraordinaire! Mattie writes about technology, music and life as a twenty-something college student.”>
<meta name=”KEYWORDS” content=”Matsie, Mattie, Mattie Kenny, music, college, student, review, fun, Daniel Johnston, blog, Elliot Smith, indie, punk, girl, chick, twitter, social media, technology, digg, friendfeed, computers, computer science, skeptic, skeptical, science, homeopathy”>
Now to move on to a few other simple, but considerably less technical SEO tips!
- Always use titles for your entries. These help the search engine label the content fo the entry. Basically, it’s just a good idea to label things whenever you can.
- Use tags and categories! I tag all of my entries with information pertinent to them, including my name. This is a good habit to form because search engines use tag and category information quite similarly to how it uses the keyword meta tags.
- Use alt-text on images. When you upload an image, you should provide alt text describing what the image is. In most WYSIWYG editors, they provide a “description” line where you can put this information.
This is by no means an in-depth look at the world of SEO, but I believe it will give you a very simple and easy way to start seeing your website grow and gain visibility. I am not an SEO expert by any means and I wouldn’t even try to convince you otherwise. I hope you found even a small bit of this helpful.
