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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
WordPress is a powerful platform for creating feature-rich and attractive websites and blogs; but with a little extra tweaking and effort your WordPress site can dominate the search engines and bring thousands of new customers to your blog or business.
WordPress3.0 Search Engine Optimization will show you the secrets that professional SEO companies use to take websites to the top of search results and proliferate their business. You'll be able to take your WordPress blog/site to the next level, as well as brush aside even the stiffest competition with this book in hand.
We'll begin with a typical WordPress installation and with a variety of simple techniques, turn it into a powerful website that search engines will reward with high rankings.
We'll go further: with advanced plug-ins we'll connect your WordPress site to popular social media sites and expand the reach of your site to bring more visitors. You'll learn about dozens of free online tools to accomplish everything from keyword research to monitoring your ranking progress.
WordPress is a great start for building search-friendly sites. However, with the tools in this book, you'll get your website/blog noticed by numerous new users/customers or your target audience.
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Table of Contents
WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization
WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization
Copyright © 2011 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: April 2011
Production Reference: 1180411
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847199-00-3
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Ed Maclean (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Michael David
Reviewers
Patrick Rushton
Srikanth A.D.
Sonia Munoz Hoyos
Acquisition Editor
Chaitanya Apte
Development Editors
Hyacintha D'Souza
Reshma Sundaresan
Technical Editor
Mohd. Sahil
Copy Editor
Leonard D'Silva
Project Coordinator
Jovita Pinto
Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Graphics
Nilesh Mohite
Indexers
Hemangini Bari
Tejal Daruwale
Production Coordinator
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Cover Work
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Foreword
I remember when bloggers would take pride in the obscurity of their blogs, believing wholeheartedly that blogging represented the last true meritocracy of the Internet, a place where if you were a good writer and had interesting things to say, you'd gain a readership. Otherwise, if you were lucky, your Mom might read your occasional ramblings but that was probably it, your brilliance doomed to languish in digital obscurity.
Times change and the way people find information online has evolved from our friend's online recommendations to Google. Google! Google! Google! If you're talking about finding information in the online world, it seems to be the first and almost only place people go to find things, whether they're on a mobile device, sitting at a cafe with their laptop or at a fancy desktop system. Heck, one of the most common search terms on Yahoo is the word "google"!
The techniques and best practices have changed for maximizing the number of readers that find your content too. It continues to be important to have high quality content—after all, what are people going to encounter once they get to your site?—though the best writer in the world isn't going to be a success if their site's at the end of a dusty, isolated, and abandoned e-road.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consists of both on-page and off-page tactics and this book goes into both areas in great detail, explaining why something is more important than showing how to improve it on your own blog, hands on and with case studies. Not only that, Michael knows that saying "I want to rank well on Google" makes no sense, because you can't begin to have success until you decide forwhichterms you want to rank. Know the language of your customers, weave that into your content and site and you'll reap the benefit.
I think about SEO in terms of "findability" and when I talk about findability with bloggers, I talk about the benefits of learning how to maximize the chance of someone who is searching for your information, your product, your service, finding you, not a competitor. Sounds good, doesn't it?
That's why you've picked up the right book. Michael has captured all the key concepts associated with both search engine optimization and blogging and neatly explained them in this must-have book for any WordPress blogger. Here's something else to think about: even if you're not using WordPress this is a good read because it'll help explain why search engines already like blogs (lots of fresh, narrowly focused content) and how you can rethink your own approach to blogging and increasing your site traffic.
And who among us bloggers doesn't want more readers, more traffic, and more comments on our blogs?
Dave Taylor
Blogger at AskDaveTaylor.com, DaveOnFilm.com, and APparenting.com
About the Author
MichaelDavid is a programmer, web designer, and search engine optimization consultant with a wide range of expertise in Web and search technologies. He is a panel speaker at Webmaster World's PubCon educational conferences for web professionals, and a speaker at SCORE—a national non-profit organization that offers business mentoring services to small business entrepreneurs. He is the founder and President of TastyPlacement, a search placement and internet marketing firm based in Austin, Texas. TastyPlacement serves national and local businesses through search marketing, pay-per-click management, website development, content development, and social media strategy. TastyPlacement's clients span a wide range of niches and properties, from national e-commerce outlets and national brands (MonsterRax, SpiBelt), photo sharing sites (WreckedExotics.com, ExoticSpotter.com), to businesses in local markets from Hawaii to Maine.
I'd like to thank my family for their help and support in bringing this book to completion. I'd also like to thank Dave Taylor for getting me started in the writing game. I also relied upon members of my staff, Peter Attia, Marshall Owen, and Beth Parker for ideas and insights.
About the Reviewers
PatrickRushton is a British designer / developer living and working in the Netherlands. He works as Senior Interaction Designer at Amsterdam-based digital agency LBi Lost Boys where he creates brand-building digital experiences that combine rich interactivity, motion graphics, and gameplay.
He has contributed to other Packt publications as technical reviewer for Papervision 3D Essentials and WordPress with Flash 10.x Cookbook.
Patrick blogs about UX, web design, 3D and interactive television on his website http://www.patrickrushton.com
SrikanthA.D. is a Web Developer & SEO Consultant. He is passionate about developing and optimizing websites for better search engine visibility and user experience. Sharing interesting tools and services pertaining to web development and SEO across technology blogs is one of his active hobbies.
He has written articles for some of the popular blogs such as MakeUseOf, TheNextWeb, QuickOnlineTips, Lost in Technology, 1stWebDesigner, and others.
Blog: http://www.readaboutseo.com
I would like to thank Packt Publishing for giving me this incredible opportunity to review a prolific book.
Sonia Munoz Hoyos is a web programmer in Valencia, Spain. She has completed her upper computer systems management and has now finished studying the upper development of computer applications where is learning the Java programming language and PL/SQL. She has worked with tools such as PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JQuery, JavaScript, Codeigniter, Joomla!, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Oracle, and PL/SQL, but is willing to learn new programming languages.
After completing her studies, she would like to start her own web development business.
To Manu and my parents
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Preface
WordPress is a powerful and effective open source web publishing platform that enables anyone, regardless of computer skills, to create and maintain a world-class website. Millions of people worldwide have adopted WordPress, and its popularity continues to increase. In February of 2011, WordPress.org reported over 32.5 million downloads of WordPress version 3.0. When you combine all the WordPress users that haven't yet upgraded, it's obvious that WordPress is firmly established as one of the most popular web publishing platforms.
Its popularity is well-deserved. WordPress is easy to use, fun, efficient, and as we will learn in this book, creates search engine-friendly websites.
This book offers a practical, hands-on approach to installing, building, and optimizing a WordPress blog or website in a way that search engines will love. We'll unlock the hidden and not-so-hidden elements that search engines look for when they return search results for their visitors. We'll also look at a wide range of new ways to market your website or blog through secondary channels such as video sites and social media. And, we'll learn that WordPress is particularly well suited for extension into these other channels.
We'll learn about Google's recommended best practices and how to implement the best ranking strategies when planning and executing your web marketing plan. We'll learn to identify and safely avoid a host of forbidden "black hat" techniques that search engines frown upon.
We'll learn the full spectrum of search ranking factors and techniques: keyword research, title tag optimization, link building, site architecture, and more. Finally, we'll take everything we learn about search engine optimization and learn how to implement it on the WordPress platform.
With the tools in this book and the inherent power of WordPress, you have the opportunity to create a high-ranking website that can compete in search in any market.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started: SEO Basics, will cover the basics of SEO from start to finish, introducing topics such as on-page ranking factors, how search engines work, and link building.
Chapter 2, Customizing WordPress Settings for SEO, will align your SEO strategy with the WordPress platform and help you solidify your plan. You'll need to set realistic goals and timelines for your business or website through educated investigation and analysis. Proper and thorough planning will ensure that you'll succeed even in competitive search markets.
Chapter 3, Researching and Working with Keywords, will begin by building a keyword list based on what you have to offer consumers. We'll examine whether it's wiser to focus on a few high-value terms, or to build out a broad keyword list and rank for a wide variety of phrases. We'll learn how to group keywords into manageable groups and how to leverage grouped keywords for maximum SEO benefit.
Chapter 4, Understanding Technical Optimization, will cover how to take what we've learned about keyword research and implement a ranking strategy. We'll build a "perfect web page"—a web page where all the elements work together to achieve maximum ranking power. We will learn how to craft a domain name that is well-poised to rank for primary keywords. We will examine how to create an effective WordPress permalink structure.
Chapter 5, Creating Optimized and Engaging Content, will begin by learning how to better engage visitors with your content. We'll learn how to write effective titles and headlines—how to grab readers' attention from the start.
Chapter 6, Link Building, will begin by covering some general topics in link building such as how and where to get links. We'll learn about PageRank, Google's trademarked and patented process for counting the inbound "votes" we receive as links from other websites.
Chapter 7, Using Social Media, will help us learn how to harness social media to promote your company or website and supplement your search strategy.
Chapter 8, Avoiding the Black Hat Techniques, will take a tour through the seedy side of SEO. We'll examine a wide range of black and gray hat techniques—and why it is imperative that you avoid them.
Chapter 9, Avoiding SEO Mistakes, will examine errors in keyword research that can lead to ranking troubles well into the future. We will look at the complex challenges surrounding site architecture and look into some common mistakes that webmasters make
Chapter 10, Testing Your Site and Monitoring Your Progress, will cover a range of tools with which you will monitor the quality of your website, learn how search spiders interact with your site, measure your rankings in search engines for various keywords, and analyze how your visitors behave when they are on your site.
Appendix A, WordPress SEO Plugins, will cover some of the most helpful and powerful plugins that can help you take your WordPress site to the next level.
Appendix B, Other SEO Resources, will discover some resources that can help you stay on top of the search engine optimization for your website.
What you need for this book
Some prior knowledge of WordPress is expected but no prior knowledge of search engine optimization is required to use this book. You'll need to begin with a working installation of the self-hosted version of WordPress.
Beyond that, you'll need little more than a web browser and your wits. All the tools in this book—including the installation of powerful WordPress plugins—can be accessed through your web browser.
Who this book is for
This book is written for anyone using WordPress, ranging from owners of business sites to website developers and blog owners. Any WordPress user who wants to sell products or services, or send out a message to the world will find that getting better rankings in the search engines will help them reach their goal faster.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: " Furthermore, the use of the nofollow attribute is generally not possible with WordPress' dynamically-generated navigation menus "
A block of code is as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "When you create a new Page or Post, you simply need to click the Edit link next to Publishimmediately in the Publish box when creating new content."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Chapter 1. Getting Started: SEO Basics
Welcome to SEO for WordPress! This title is intended to take you through the steps required to make your blog or website rank in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and many more. If you've selected WordPress as the platform for your site, you have made a good choice; WordPress is both powerful and easy to use, and ideally suited for both large collaborative blogs and small business websites.
Even better, WordPress has innate characteristics that search engines love such as simple navigation, SEO-friendly URL-naming conventions, easy publishing, and many more. With the tools in this book, you can take your WordPress blog or site to the next level. Whether you want to increase the reach and broadcasting power of your blog, or edge out the competition in search results for your small business, you'll find the tools and the guidance to do so within these pages.
So let's get started!
In this first chapter, we will cover the basics of SEO from start to finish. This chapter is not intended as a complete search engine optimization guide; we simply won't have the opportunity to cover any individual topic with the depth that it requires. It's more important, at this stage, just to have a 10,000 foot view.
For some of you, these concepts will be review, and for others, these concepts will represent the foundation upon which your more advanced knowledge of search engine optimization will be built.
Introducing SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process and discipline of improving the quality and visibility of a website in order to increase its ranking in search engines, thereby increasing the visitor traffic. That's a simple definition, but it captures the essence of SEO.
Webmasters started optimizing websites in the mid-90s, soon after search engines began cataloguing the growing number of websites that were appearing on the Internet. The term "search engine optimization" is believed to have come into use in 1997. Today, search marketing is estimated to be a 15-billion dollar industry in the US alone, with tens of thousands of self-help entrepreneurs succeeding quite effectively as well.
The roots of the modern-day search optimization actually began decades earlier with the original database query technologies of the 1960s. The first search technologies were much simpler than today's. A typical database query in the 1960s might search a few hundred thousand records for a specific term, such as a city name or ZIP code.
SEO can be quite powerful. It can mean the difference between hundreds or thousands of engaged and relevant visitors to your website or nearly no visitors at all. In almost any marketplace for goods and services on the Internet, you can see businesses with top rankings enjoying financial prosperity.
The first ten search results for a query—the first page of search results in nearly all search engines—is now universally seen as a highly desirable target placement. Indeed, statistics generally show that a very small number of search users ever look beyond the first page of search results; most studies reveal that only between 6% and 3% of all the search engine queries result in a visit to the second page of search results—a meager portion.
SEO levels the playing field. Access to media such as newspapers, magazines, and television used to be reserved for those willing to pay for the privilege. Nowadays, a small home-based business can compete—sometimes quite effectively—with the largest Fortune 500 company.
Google doesn't care how big your office is, how many trucks your business uses in its distribution chain, or how many high-definition cameras you employ to produce your blog; Google has no way of knowing, and they probably wouldn't care. What Google can do, however, is apply its sophisticated algorithm to the content of your website's pages and the content of the sites that link to you.
There is a common joke about two campers in a forest that are approached by a bear. One camper reaches immediately for his running shoes. The other camper asks, "Why are you putting on those running shoes? You can't outrun that bear." The other camper replies, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you." That's how search placement works; you simply need to do a little bit more than the next guy. There is no minimum threshold for obtaining a search ranking other than the threshold established by your search competitors. Do a little bit more, be a little bit smarter, and your rankings will rise.
SEO has several close relatives.SEM (SearchEngineMarketing) is a broader term that refers to SEO as well as paid-search placement, contextual advertising, and paid-inclusion advertising. It is also important to think of SEO as including "conversion optimization"—the study and practice of improving the conversion of visitors to customers after they visit your web page.
Always remember a search engine's core purpose is to deliver relevant search results to a user entering a query.
Note
Nearly all of us have used the Lycos search engine at one time; but almost no one uses the service any more. Why not? Because the Lycos search engine didn't return very good results for users. Either the results were not relevant, or the results were diluted with ads. For whatever reason, Lycos was not as good as Google at delivering a relevant set of usable results in response to a query.
It's important to keep in mind the role of the search engine. Too often, webmasters think or say Google is "against" them because Google appears to rank lower-value sites in favor of their own. The truth is the exact opposite; Google wants you to rank—as long as your result serves the needs of its user base. You need to give Google what it's looking for (or Yahoo! or Bing, as the case maybe), and Google will rank your site higher.
In this book, we will take an in-depth look into how to apply sound and tested search engine optimization techniques to the success of your WordPress website or blog.
Improving your rank on all search engines
While Google is the undisputed leading search engine worldwide, there are, of course, alternative search engines; the fortunes of the various search engines ebb and flow with Google maintaining a commanding lead. Comscore.com is a well-regarded analyst of search engine metric and reports Google's share of US search queries at about 64%, Yahoo! at about 17%, and Bing/Microsoft at about 12%. The remaining field is made up of a handful of third-tier search engines such as Ask.com, Dogpile.com, and hundreds of smaller search engines.
So how does one rank for all search engines? The answer is easy; optimize for Google. Google's search algorithm is the most advanced, and is certainly the best at detecting disfavored optimization techniques such as keywords stuffing, paid link arrangements, and so on. Furthermore, Google's technology is so dominant that the other search engines imitate most of Google's innovations.
And so, if you rank well for Google, you'll certainly be well-positioned to rank well in the other search engines. Keep in mind, however, that Google is also the most responsive search engine: Google crawls (visits) your site more often and indexes websites faster than the other search engines. So, as you work on optimization, you might see positive changes in Google rankings in a few weeks, whereas the other search engines might take months to respond.
Exploring the changing nature of search engines
Keep an open mind about what constitutes a search engine. The traditional definition of a search engine—a destination website into which desktop-based users enter typed search queries—is already eroding. For several years, Google has been testing, tweaking, and improving its voice recognition system. It was clear early on that Google had already envisioned a day in the near future where search queries would be voiced rather than typed. Sure enough, the increasingly popular Android mobile device platform has voice recognition technology integrated into its architecture. The near future will bring further progress in the types of devices on which users perform searches as well as the input device into which these searches are made. Near term trending shows that we'll see growth in both mobile-based searches and voice-input searches. Staying ahead of trends in search can help you best your competitors in search rankings.
While the type of input device doesn't necessarily change the fundamental nature of search, the increasing variety of specialized search properties does. In recent years, an increasing number of specialized sites have emerged for special-purpose searches. Yelp.com is a destination site for people seeking highly recommended local businesses and hot spots. KGB.com offers premium, human responses to queries touted as "answers, not links." Goby is a recent search engine specifically designed to help users find activities in a local area. This is a trend; the first search engines were either directories, single search boxes, or both. Now, there are thousands of individual properties employing hundreds of different approaches to search.
Understanding a search engine's inner working
One of my favorite academic questions to ask people about search technology is, "When do you think Internet searching was invented?" While the exact date is elusive, the answer is nearly always wrong—by several decades. Routinely, people reflect the common understanding that search technology was invented in the 1990s.
Actually, a search engine merely employs search query and indexing principles that were conceived and implemented decades before in a mainframe environment. Indexing, coupled with search queries, allowed early computer operators to quickly select relevant information from large databases in the infancy of the computer age. The Internet is simply a much larger database and a modern search engine is simply a much more robust and sophisticated search query tool.
Preparing the index
A search engine does not store your web pages; it stores an index of your web pages. For your page to appear in a search engine's index, that search engine first sends a search spider to visit your site and read your web pages' content. The spider returns the information to adocumentprocessor that processes your web pages into a format that the queryprocessor understands. The document processor performs several formatting tasks: it might remove stop words, lower-value terms that bear little relation to the page's topic, like "the," "and," "it," and the likes. The document processor will also performtermstemming, where suffixes like -ing, -er, -es, -ed are stripped from search terms. In essence, a document processor trims content to reveal the contextual elements of a web page and prepares the entry for indexing.
The index contains much of the information from your pages, along with the other data that the search engine uses to evaluate and categorize your pages. As a highly-simplified example, Google's index of your page will contain the text of your page on a date in the recent past when its spider last visited along with other data such as:
That description is grossly simplified, but points out that what the search engine attempts to match is not your page itself, but a processed and analyzed version of your page.
Querying the index
Once the index is prepared, the page is available for querying. The query processor, along with a search and matching engine, performs the nuts and bolts of the search function, thus matching a user's query to store entries in the search engine's index. The final element is a sound methodology for ranking query results. If everything works as planned, the search engine returns a sensibly ordered set of results to each user's query.
Peeking into the mechanics of search gives us a few guidelines to follow. One core principle that emerges is that keywords are the signposts that search engines use to determine the subject and value of web pages—without relevant and contextual words on your pages, the search engines cannot accurately index your pages. The other important idea is that a search engine searches an index—it doesn't search your pages directly. Therefore, if your pages aren't in the index, they aren't going to be found. These concepts will re-emerge as we work through the chapters in this book.
Exploring on-page search ranking factors
SEO professionals lump search engine optimization techniques thought out into three categories: on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and conversion. On-pageoptimization is concerned with all of the text, images, code, words, navigation, structure, and so on within the four corners of your website—all of the factors you control that appear "on-page". Off-pageoptimization refers to all of the material on the Internet concerning or pointing to your website that does not appear "on-page"; for the most part, off-page optimization refers to inbound links on the third-party websites. Conversion refers to how effective your website is at making users take actions once they appear on your site. A high-performing website needs all three elements working together.
On-page factors include the following:
But how important are each of these factors? How do we know that one factor is more important than another? The software or programs that Google and the other search engines use to determine rankings are referred to as an "algorithm." While the behavior of the search engines can sometimes appear remarkably intuitive and almost human, the science underlying a search algorithm is ultimately reduced to complex mathematics.
Weighing search factors
Search engines must assign particular importance or weight to various on-page factors. A webpage's title tag, for example, is widely considered to be a strong indicator of the subject matter of a webpage. As such, a title tag has a very strong influence on search rankings. Conversely, the filenames of images on a webpage, such as texas_web_marketing.jpg, would not necessarily be as strong an indicator of the subject matter of a webpage. So, search engines apply much less weight to the image filenames in their ranking algorithms. Search engines value different web page factors differently—this variance is referred to by SEO professionals as "weight". Title tags and heading tags are afforded greater weight, while image filenames, alt tags, and bold text are given less weight. That is not to say that bold text and image filenames are not important. In fact, it's the use of these low-weight attributes that can give a webpage that extra push to higher rankings. When all of the ranking factors are present and utilized effectively and combined with a sound program of developing inbound links, the effect is almost supernatural—the combined effect of all factors working together can develop tremendous ranking power.
Understanding the search algorithm
The details of Google's search algorithm are not disclosed to the public. Google's public statements, Webmaster guidelines, and patent filings give us some general insight into the overall approach of its search algorithm. However, the details are closely-guarded secrets. For example, how does Google's algorithm treat a title tag—how much weight is afforded to this important component of a webpage? Is it 30%? 20%? Even if we did know, Google's search algorithm is subject to constant tweaking and updating. So, we know that a webpage's title tag is important, but the actual numerical importance within the Google algorithm we will never know.
So if the relative importance of different ranking factors isn't publicly disclosed, how do we even know which ranking factors are more important? The answer lies a little bit with the search engines' public statements, a little bit with logic, a little bit with experience, and a little bit by the consensus developed by SEO professionals and hobbyists.
We will examine each of these ranking factors in turn.
Ranking factor: body content
Body content simply means the "words on the page," actual ASCII text readable by a search engine. This important factor is too often ignored by webmasters. Some of the most egregious examples of webmasters that miss this important factor are sites with little or no text, sites which rely on image files to display text and messages, and flash-based sites. Search engines do not read the text in pictures or effectively read the text in the Flash files. So, if you are describing your service in the image file or Flash file, your message will not be read, and you will not rank for those terms.
A search engine needs to be able to find text on a webpage in order to make an evaluation of what your page is about. The text on your pages should meet the following rules:
A webpage should be of a reasonable length, at least 250 words. A page length of 400 or 500 words is better, but one can get by with shorter pages in some cases. In a more competitive search market, 250 words may not be enough and you'll need to increase your page length to rank effectively.
A webpage's body text should be focused; the page should deal with a narrow set of keyword phrases and not try to cover too much ground. If your web pages cover too many separate topics or keyword phrases in one page, you'll dilute the ranking power of each individual phrase and you'll rank for nothing.
You need to stay on-topic. If you are creating a page describing your expert IT services, don't fill the page up with about 60 percent testimonials; those testimonials may have value to your readers—and testimonials certainly have a place and a role in creating websites where your target readers are potential customers—but testimonials will not necessarily contain the keywords for which you want to rank. So, keep your webpages' body text focused on the topic of that page.
Similarly, don't cover too many topics within your body text. For example, say you want to create an Amazon affiliate page on your website and you try to rank for "WordPress books," "Joomla! books," and "Books on Web Design." If you try to rank for all three keywords on one page, you'll have to divide your content among a discussion of these separate topics. You'll dilute your ranking power for the phrase "WordPress books" by repeating the terms "Joomla! books" and "Books on Web Design" within the body text of your page. The better approach is to build three separate pages, each with a focus on one related family of keywords. Conversely, if you wanted to rank for "WordPress books", "Books on WordPress", and "Best WordPress books", you could create a single page to rank for all those terms because you can easily write body text that will include all those phrases. Your focused page will rank quite well.
Serious ranking power: title tags and meta tags
Title tags and meta tags are strings of text that are inserted in the head section of a web page. These tags are inconspicuous to a user, although not entirely hidden. The title tag appears in the top bar of the browser window, but does not appear on the web page itself. The meta tags do not appear to the user, they are intended for search engines to read. The principal meta tags for use in search optimization are meta keyword tags and meta description tags.
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Title tags are the most important ranking factor on an individual webpage; they are highly weighted by the search engines.
Often, a simple change to a title tag alone can yield significant changes in rankings. Again, remember the role of a search engine: to determine the topic of a webpage and return relevant results to its users. The title tag, logically, is perhaps the greatest signpost of what a page is actually about.
Title tags serve another important role; when a user enters a search query into a search engine, the first line of each entry on the search engine results pages is taken from each page's title tag. So, now your title tag presents an opportunity to attract searchers to click on your result out of a field of other websites on a search engine results page. Not only that, both Yahoo! and Google bold the words used in the search query within the title tags that they display on the search engine results page. So, if you use keywords effectively in your title tag, Google will highlight your entry in the search engine results page and that can help increase the click-through rate to your website pages.
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Making perfect title tags
Keep in mind, space on a search engine results page is limited, so Yahoo! and Google don't show title tags longer than 70 or 80 characters. Try a search for almost anything and you'll see that if the title tag of the destination webpage is too long, the search engines truncate the title tag. Keep your title tags to 70 characters or less.
Also, keep in mind that search engines measure keyword prominence in title tags. This means that the first word in a title tag is afforded greater weight than the last word in the title tag. Put into practice, this means you should put your company name as the last word in your title tag and save the valuable and more prominent area of your title tag (the first 30 to 40 characters) for keywords related to your business or industry.
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Your business' name is not a high-competition keyword
Don't use your business' name or slogan in valuable on-page positions like the first five words of your title tag—you'll likely rank for your business' name even if that name doesn't appear in your title tag at all because there's little competition for your business' name as a search term. Save those key positions for high-volume, competitive search terms, and user your business' name in less important positions like in the body of your text or at the end of your title tag, after the keywords. For example, an ideal title tag for a pet grooming service would be Pet Grooming & Pet Care | NewYork | ThePamperedPooch.
Meta keyword tags are the subject of some confusion and remain misused and even abused. Some uninformed webmasters erroneously believe that stuffing keywords into a keyword meta tag will help rank for those terms. That hasn't been true since about 2000 or 2001, yet the myth persists. In fact, Google is on record as saying that their algorithm no longer takes into account meta keyword tags.
If you were to use meta keyword tags, use them for Bing and Yahoo!, but not for Google. And, don't overdo it with meta keyword tags: less is more. Remember, you want to focus your web pages on a fairly narrow topic area so you will never need more than 15 or so meta keyword tags. A truly well-crafted page will use five to seven meta keywords.
Unlike keyword tags, meta description tags are very relevant to search results. Description tags are afforded substantial weight by search engines. Also consider that keyword prominence applies to description tags, so keep your important terms within the beginning of the description tag. Don't repeat your keywords excessively; if a search engine discovers your keyword used repeatedly, it might filter out your results.
Description tags, like title tags, are used by search engines when they display search engine results pages. On a Google search engine results page, the description tag comprises the second and third line of each standard four-line entry. This presents an opportunity for your description tag. Your description tag can serve as a hook to readers to invite them to click on your result in lieu of all the other search results. Again, length is important because search engines only display about 160 characters of a meta description tag on a search engine results page. And, if you are thinking you'll get some extra boost in rankings by creating a longer meta description, don't bother: it is widely believed that the major search engines only index the first 160 characters of the meta description tag. Anything more than 160 characters is ignored.
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"Sell" with your meta description
Meta descriptions are not merely repositories for keywords! Your meta description can "hook" customers and bring them to your site.
Because search engines display the meta tag in search results pages, that text may have quite a lot to do with whether a person clicks on your link, or one of the 20 or so other links on a search results page. Don't use tired, stale descriptions; give your meta tag life and fire. See the image below for an example of an expertly drafted meta tag.
Google will nearly always display some text on the second and third line of each entry on its results page. What does Google display on search engine results pages if no description tag is present? If Google finds no description tag present, its algorithm will select some text from the body of the page and insert it as the description on its search engine results pages. For obvious reasons, this result is not ideal.
The following screenshot of a Google search result demonstrates Internet company Promodo's expert drafting of its meta description tag:
Using heading tags (h1, h2, h3)
The earliest specifications for HTML included provisions for document headings and subheadings, elements known as heading tags. Heading tag elements begin at h1 and progress to h6, and each level is intended to represent an ordered and organized taxonomy. These tags serve multiple roles.
As mark-up tags, these elements conveniently format the text elements to which they are applied. For example, anh1 tag will generate large text, in a bold font, with margins above and below—much like the headline in a newspaper article.
As HTML standards matured and CSS formatting became available in browsers, many web designers abandoned heading tags in search of prettier formatting for their headings. True, you can make text big and bold with CSS mark-up or with HTML formatting; you can make any text look like a heading without utilizing heading tags. However, in the world of search, that is a blunder because you will build almost no search engine ranking power from simply formatting text.
For search engines, heading tags serve a supplemental function beyond formatting. Heading tags serve as signposts that help search engines determine the context and topic of a web page. Heading tags are certainly part of search algorithms, and are given moderate weight in determining search position.
The best methodology for employing heading tags is to do the following. First, your page should only employ an h1 tag once. The text of the h1 tag should describe the main topic of the web page upon which it appears and should include the high-value, high-volume keywords for which you want to rank. Next, at a minimum, you should employ both h1 and h2 tags. Yourh2 tags should repeat your important keywords—but with additional terms to give context to the section that the h2 tag covers. For example, if you are writing a page about air conditioning service and repair, you might employ h2 tags with text such as, "Your best choice for air conditioning service," and "Licensed and insured air conditioning service."
h3 tags are optional, but can come in handy for organizing longer pages. The search engine ranking power of heading tags decreases as you progress from h1 down through the lower orders of heading tags. Thus, h1 tags are mandatory, h2 tags are highly recommended, and h3 tags are necessary only in the most competitive markets. Heading tags have a complementary effect when combined with an effective title tag, body text, and meta description—when these elements are in accord, a search engine can more comfortably determine the main context of a web page, and can more confidently reward that web page with higher rankings.
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Remember also that keyword prominence applies to heading tags, so greater weight is given to the words at the beginning of the tag.
Optimizing code quality and load speed
Code quality is an often-overlooked element of search ranking. Because it's overlooked, it represents a great opportunity to edge out less alert or less informed competitors. Code quality refers to the quality, amount, and load speed of the code and image sizes underlying your website. Search engines like quality code and fast loading times; poor quality code and slow loading times means a poor user experience for searchers.
HTML is an open source family of mark-up languages designed with fairly strict specifications set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards are updated every few years and result in new versions of HTML, such is the upgrade from HTML 3 to HTML 4. HTML 5 is under revision and will represent the next major redesign of the HTML standard.
When the code quality underlying a website does not meet the specifications of the HTML standard, the website may not display properly in all browsers. If the code is filled with errors or lacks proper elements such as an HTML doctype declaration, then that website may actually perform poorly in search engines. To test your code for validation, visit the W3C's free validator at http://validator.w3.org/.
The amount of code underlying the website can affect its load speed. The proper use of CSS can help a website reduce mindless repetition of attribute statements like font-size and color. Users of WordPress can worry less about code quality. Assuming that the WordPress template employed by a website does not contain coding errors, WordPress generally delivers very lean code that validates perfectly.
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Image size can also affect load speed.
Always be sure you are using a compressed image format whenever possible. For example, use JPEG format for photographs with an appropriate amount of compression. The faster the images load, the faster your web pages will load.
Menus, internal navigation, and link structure
Link architecture refers to the way a website's menus and navigation links are constructed. Link architecture can be very powerful and it's also one of the hardest topics in search to truly master.
The anchor text (the blue underlined text) of a website link is a ranking factor whether that link is from a site linking into your site, or is simply a link on your own site. For that reason, you have an opportunity to rank for certain terms by carefully selecting the anchor text that you use in your navigation menus. The most perfect example of the misuse of this principle in practice is the common employment of the term "Home" as the anchor text in navigation menus to point to a website's home page. A website's homepage has more ranking potential than any interior page on a website. For that reason, the anchor text pointing to the home page should be carefully selected. For example, instead of "Home", consider employing keyword-rich phrases such as "Austin's Best Carpet Cleaning" or "VW Repair" as the navigation anchor text.
