Simple solutions to search engine optimization (with spiders!)

Written By: Erica Shekell

Photo credit: User TorqueDog on http://forums.beyond.ca/.

Websites with flowery words, witty metaphors and heartwarming platitudes have a place in search engine results - the bottom of the very last page. That is, of course, if it’s even listed at all.

If you want to optimize your website to rise to the top of search engines - and thus be exposed to many more viewers, ones who didn’t know your site existed and didn’t intend to find it, but somehow stumbled upon it and found that it had exactly what they were looking for - you have to cut to the chase.

On the web, if you want to be seen, you have to to come right out and say what you’re all about. No cutesy titles - be blunt and be bold. Title your website exactly what it’s about. Use keywords in your title, the headings, the body text (particularly the first paragraph), tags and the URLs of individual pages.

Then promote your website using social media websites and other popular websites that are highly-ranked - and use these key words to promote it.

Why do Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines like websites with all of these keywords?

Spiders.

Search engines use spider bots - also called web crawlers, web robots, ants, automatic indexers, etc. - to scour the web for websites. These programs systematically follow URLs and hyperlinks within web pages to add them to a list.

Photo credit: Aftermath News

With that said, you want to link to and be linked to by others. Link to high-ranked sites in your field, and if you’re incredibly lucky and get the attention of these high-profile sites by providing your own useful an original content that they feel is worth sharing with others, they might turn their eye to you (think: the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings) and post a link to your site for their viewers - and your search engine page ranking will rise.

Spider bots regularly check in on URLs for any new content that has been added. They create copies of this data to send to the search engine to index and store. The better your content (like your keywords), the more websites you have pointing to your site, and the more page views you have, the more often the spider bots will find you.

Then when someone searches for specific keywords - hopefully the ones you included in your site - the search engine will search through its database and show the websites -hopefully yours - that contain the keywords from their search.

But you shouldn’t abuse keywords.

Some YouTube users do this. When they want their video to be seen by millions of people, some tag their video with keywords that they know are popular searches at the time - for example, “Lady Gaga,” “Glee,” “So You Think You Can Dance,” “Twilight,” “Harry Potter,” “Justin Bieber” - when the video is really a 30-second clip of their two pet turtles swimming in a pond.

This is all well and good for users who simply want views - because they’re shooting for quantity, not quality, and they’ll likely succeed in this goal - but views are not the same as purchases, with is what you’re looking for. And you also have to ask, “How long will a viewer actually watch the video before getting bored or realizing it’s not what they’re looking for and click away?”

If the YouTuber used this tactic to sell a product - for example, turtle food - not many of the people who clicked on the video thinking it was about Lady Gaga will be interested in buying turtle food.

And those who ARE looking to buy turtle food won’t find the video.

The lesson: your keywords have to match your content. Blindly pushing as many people as possible to your site won’t benefit you.

This brings me to the next lesson: once it’s tagged well and tagged right, your content has to be good.

Provide valuable information in the form of easy-to-read text, photos, videos, graphs, etc. to keep your viewer interested.

Also make sure that you have plenty of links to other pages within your site that an individual might find useful. These inbound links will help a person find what they’re looking for so they will hopefully make a purchase, donation, or whatever action you want them to take. If your site is about turtles and you want to hyperlink the words “turtle food” to a web page about the specific topic, don’t link to another site, and definitely don’t link to a dictionary! Link to your own page about turtle food.

Another tip: don’t link to everywhere. Link only to very important pages on very important topics. if you link to everything, your visitor won’t know what’s important and what’s useless. Links have power, but there’s only so much power to go around - don’t water that power down.

When deciding which key words or phrases are important enough to link to another page within your site, think about your audience (as you have been - and should be - doing throughout every step of search engine optimization!).

If you start to talk about how good-quality turtle food is needed to help baby turtles grow, at this point, what do you think an interested visitor might be thinking? If they’re reading the paragraph about baby turtles, is it possible that they might have a baby turtle themselves? Link the words “baby turtles” to a page about the specific nutritional needs of baby turtles - and nudge them further along the path toward purchasing special turtle food for baby turtles.

Always be thinking about each unique situation that your visitors may be in, and tailor your message to appeal to them. Create a network of pathways from each of your web pages to other pages that might appeal to different sub-groups of people. Think of it like a board game - there are many forks in the road, and each player will choose a different fork depending on their situation, but they’ll all end up at the same finish line.

Your job is to educate and entice your visitors with information (and maybe some fun!) to get them to the finish line - the action you want them to ultimately take - before they get bored with the game and quit.

Lastly, engage with your audience/consumers through social media. Don’t use Twitter to just dump out information and links to your news releases. Re-tweet something that a customer tweeted to you, link a positive comment or useful information or feedback. Respond to them.

People become absolutely giddy when a company tweets back to them and often show off the fact to their friends. Why?

Because they’re used to the one-way mode of communication - companies taking up entire newspaper or magazine pages to publicize their sales and other gimmicks or blindly broadcasting flashy TV ads or radio commercial that are just downright weird. People are used to having junk thrown at them in their general direction.

A nice comment or a helpful response on your part to their criticism is not what they’re used to. And they’re delighted to find that they’re talking to an actual person who cares, not a cold corporate mask or an automated computer response.

Give it a spin.

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Erica Shekell is a journalism student at Michigan State University who is enrolled in the New Media Driver’s License Course. She is the creator of the blog New Media Shift. You can follow her on Twitter here.