Defining a clear subject theme

Another way of getting a high keyword ranking is having a clear subject
theme. If you’re selling kits to customize classic cars, keeping your Web site
streamlined and keeping all topics on the Web site relating exactly to classic
car customization not only makes it easier for users to navigate your site
and research or purchase what they need, but it also increases your chances
of having a high page rank when those search engine spiders come by. The
more similarly themed keywords you have on your pages, the better. It’s the
nature of a search engine to break up a site into subjects that add up to an
overall theme for easy categorization, and the more obvious your site theme
is, the higher your results will be.

It’s kind of like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and deciding you want to
get a salad. You, the search engine, immediately go to the salad corner of
the buffet because it’s been clearly labeled, and from there, you can do your
breakdowns. You want romaine lettuce, croutons, parmesan cheese, and
Caesar dressing, so you go to where they keep the lettuce, the trimmings,
and the dressings in the salad bar section. It’s easy to find what you want if
everything is grouped accordingly. But if the restaurant stuck the dressing
over with the mashed potatoes, you’ll have trouble finding it because salad
dressing and mashed potatoes don’t normally go together. Similarly, when
you keep your Web site content organized with everything in its proper
place, the search engine views your content with clarity, understanding what
you’re about — which in turn increases your page ranking. Siloing is a way
of structuring your site and links in order to present a clear subject theme to
the search engines. For more on this technique, refer to Book II, Chapter 4 as
well as the entirety

Focusing on consistency
Methodical consistent implementation is the principle that, when you update
your Web site, you should do it the same way every time. Your site should
have a consistent look and feel over time without massive reorganizations at
every update. In order for a search engine to maintain efficiency, you need
to keep related content all placed in the same area. You also need to keep all
of your updating processes consistent. That way, if something goes wrong
during your next update, you can pinpoint what went wrong where without
too much hassle since you update things the same way every time. It is
confusing to customers to have things constantly changing around. Search
engines and visitors to your Web site face the same challenge as a restaurant
patron. Getting back to our salad bar analogy, the restaurant owner
shouldn’t scatter the salad dressings according to the whims of his salad bar
designer, and randomly change things every time he gets in a new dressing
or someone discontinues one of the old dressings.

Building for the long term
You need to consider your persistence for the long term. How long will your
Web site be sticking around? Ideally, like with any business, you want to
build it to last without letting it fall behind and look dated. Relevancy to the
current market is a big part of this, and if you are behind the times, you are
probably behind your competitors. The technology that you use to build
your Web site is inevitably going to change as the Internet advances, but
your approach to relevancy should remain the same, incorporating new
technologies as they arise. This is also a process you should develop over
time. In the early days of the Web, frames were used to build sites, but that
looks very outdated now. A few years ago, splash pages (introductory pages,
mostly built in Flash, that provided no content or value to the user) were
very popular. Today, they are discouraged. The Internet is an ever-changing
entity, and if you’re not persistent about keeping up with the times, you
might fall by the wayside.

Discovering the Necessary Elements for Getting High Keyword Rankings

If the mantra of real estate is location, location, location, and the very best
location on the Web is on the search engines, the mantra of SEO should be
keywords, keywords, keywords. Search engines use a process to categorize
and grade keywords in order to bring you the Web pages you’re looking for.
The more relevant your keywords are to the user’s query, the higher ranking
your page has in a search engine’s results. Keeping the keywords clear,
precise, and simple helps the search engines do their job a whole lot faster.
If you’re selling something like customized classic cars, you should probably
make sure your text includes keywords like classic cars, customized cars,
customized classic Mustangs, and so forth, as well as clarifying words like
antique, vintage, and restored. You can read more about how to choose your
keywords in Book II.

In this section, you get a broad, brief overview on how you get a higher rank
than the other guy who’s selling macadamia nut butter. You need to know
the basics, or you can’t do targeted SEO.

The advantage of an SEO-compliant site
Having an SEO-compliant Web site entails tailoring your Web site to have the
highest SERP ranking for a keyword search. This includes optimizing your
metadata and Title tag (for more on metadata, refer to Book IV, Chapter
3) so they are chock full (but not too full) of relevant keywords for your
industry. Also, make sure that your Web page contains searchable text as
opposed to lots of pretty Flash animations and images (search engines have
limited ability to understand non-text content), that all of your images contain
an Alt attribute (an alternative description of an image) with text that
describes the content of the image, and that you have keywords embedded
in your hyperlinks. You also need to be sure that all of your internal content
as well as your links are siloed. You want to be sure to optimize every single
one of these elements. Use this checklist to get yourself organized:

✦ Title tag
✦ Meta description tag
✦ Meta keywords tag
✦ Heading tag(s)
✦ Textual content
✦ Alt attributes on all images
✦ Strong/bold tags

✦ Fully-qualified links
✦ Site map
✦ Text navigation
✦ JavaScript/CSS externalized
✦ Robots text (.txt) file
✦ Web analytics
✦ Keyword research (technically a process — See Book II)
✦ Link development
✦ Image names
✦ Privacy statement
✦ Contact information
✦ Dedicated IP address

Entertainment

Research and shopping aren’t the only reasons to visit a search engine. The
Internet is a vast, addictive, reliable resource for consuming your entire
afternoon, and there are users out there who use the search engines as a
means of entertaining themselves. They look up things like videos, movie
trailers, games, and social networking sites. Technically, it’s also research,
but it’s research used strictly for entertainment purposes. A child of the
80s might want to download an old-school version of the Oregon Trail video
game onto her computer so she can recall the heady days of third grade. It’s
a quest made easy with a quick search on Google. Or if you want to find out
what those wacky young Hollywood starlets are up to, you can to turn to a
search engine to bring you what you need.

If you’re looking for a video, odds are it’s going to be something from
YouTube, much like your research results are going to come up with a
Wikipedia page. YouTube is another excellent example that achieves a high
listing on results pages. They’re an immensely popular video-sharing Web
site where anyone with a camera and a working e-mail address can upload
videos of themselves doing just about anything from talking about their
day to shaving their cats. But the videos themselves have keyword-rich
listings in order to be easily located, plus they have an option that also displays
other videos. Many major companies have jumped on the YouTube
bandwagon, creating channels for their companies (a YouTube channel is
a specific account). Record companies use channels to promote bands,
and production companies use them to unleash the official trailer for their
upcoming movie.

Shopping

A smaller percentage of people, but still very many, use a search engine in
order to shop. After the research cycle is over, search queries change to
terms that reflect a buying mindset. Terms like “best price” and “free shipping”
signal a searcher in need of a point of purchase. Optimizing a page to meet the needs of that type of visitor results in higher conversions (actions
taken by a user that meet a sales or business goal) for your site. As we
mentioned, global search engines such as Google tend to reward research
oriented sites, so your pages have to strike a balance between sales-oriented
terms and research-oriented terms.

This is where specialized engines come into the picture. Although you can
use a regular search engine to find what it is you’re shopping for, some
people find it more efficient to use a search engine geared directly towards
buying products. Some Web sites out there are actually search engines just
for shopping. Amazon, eBay, and Shopping.com are all examples of shopping-
only engines. The mainstream engines have their own shopping products
such as Google Product Search (formerly called Froogle) and Yahoo!
Shopping, where you type in the search term for the particular item you
are looking for and the engines return the actual item listed in the results
instead of the Web site where the item is sold. For example, say you’re
buying a book on Amazon.com. You type the title into the search bar, and
it returns a page of results. Now, you also have the option of either buying
it directly from Amazon, or, if you’re on a budget, you can click over to the
used book section. Booksellers provide Amazon.com with a list of their used
stock and Amazon handles all of the purchasing, shipping, and ordering info.
The same is true of Yahoo! Shopping and Google Product Search. And like all
things with the Internet, odds are that somebody, somewhere, has exactly
what you’re looking for. Figure 1-2 displays a results page from Google
Product Search.

Figuring Out Why People Use Search Engines

We’ve already established that a lot of people use search engines. But what
are people looking for when they use them? Are they doing research for
restoring their classic car? Do people use them to look for a place that sells
parts for classic cars? Or are they just looking to kill time with video that
shows custom cars racing? The answer is yes to all of the above. A search
engine is there to scour the billions on billions of Web sites out there in
order to get you where you need to go, whether it’s doing research, going
shopping, or just plain wasting time.

Research
Most people who are using a search engine are doing it for research purposes.
They are generally looking for answers or at least to data with which
to make a decision. They’re looking to find a site to fulfill a specific purpose.
Someone doing a term paper on classic cars for their Automotive History
101 class would use it to find statistics on the number of cars sold in the
United States, instructions for restoring and customizing old cars, and possibly
communities of classic car fanatics out there. Companies would use it in
order to find where their clients are, and who their competition is.

Search engines are naturally drawn to research-oriented sites and usually
consider them more relevant than shopping-oriented sites, which is why, a
lot of the time, the highest listing for the average query is a Wikipedia page.
Wikipedia is an open-source online reference site that has a lot of searchable
information, tightly cross-linked with millions of back links. Open source
means that anyone can have access to the text and edit it. Wikipedia is
practically guaranteed to have a high listing on the strength of its site architecture
alone. (We go over site architecture in much more depth later on in
Book IV.) Wikipedia is an open-source project, thus information should be
taken with a grain of salt as there is no guarantee of accuracy. This brings
us to an important lesson of search engines — they base “authority” on
perceived expertise. Accuracy of information is not one of their criteria:
Notability is.

In order to take advantage of research queries, you need to gear your site
content toward things that would be of interest to a researcher. “How to”
articles, product comparisons, reviews, and free information are all things
that attract researchers to your site.