SEO for fun and profit

Thumbnail cropped form a screenshot showing Google search results for Codeistry. Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is, despite all the hype, pretty simple. It essentially boils down to two things: making it easy for search engines to find your stuff, and improving your 'ranking' - how high up the list your pages come in search results, for a particular query.

Making your site Accessible

It's all about making your site accessible to search engines, so they can easily find your stuff - and add it to their indexes - so that your site turns up in search results.

So, how do you do that then? Well, search engines pretty much only care about two things: text and links.

Text

Text is just the words, in plain old text. If you lock away your words inside pictures, flash or PDF files, search engines can't read them so easily, so they either won't index them at all, or won't index them as well.

Links

Screenshot of the MODx CMS manager, showing a bit of the Codeistry site structure. Link the pages of your site together in a logical, easy to follow way. Your site should have a simple, straightforward structure that's logical and easy to follow. Make all your links just plain links, not JavaScript only links or clickable flash links, that way everyone can follow them.

Each 'thing' on your site should have it's own unique address, or URL. This address - which is shown in the browsers address bar - allows other people to find your stuff and make bookmarks & links to it. For example, if you have a product catalogue, each item should have it's own page, so that it gets it's own URL. That way, people can bookmark or link to individual items, not just your homepage.

Make your links short, meaningful and friendly. For example, these:

http://www.codeistry.com/products/big_site
http://www.codeistry.com/products/medium_site
http://www.codeistry.com/products/small_site

are much better than these:

http://www.codeistry.com/GenerateContent?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=6587&CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE=0&MENU_ID=13014
http://www.codeistry.com/GenerateContent?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=6588&CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE=0&MENU_ID=13753
http://www.codeistry.com/GenerateContent?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=6589&CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE=0&MENU_ID=25487

Page rank & local rank

Google ranks your page in its search results by how important the web in general thinks they are. Google measures this by counting up the incoming links to your page and giving your page a score, based on this. The more incoming links you have - and the higher all their scores are - the higher your score will be. A higher score (or pagerank) means that your page will appear closer to the top in search results, for a given query.

People tend to link to pages which they think are useful and interesting, so these types of pages get linked to more often and naturally float to the top of Google's search results.

Links from sites which are about similar things to yours count for more. This means that just having lots of 'backlinks' from random sites all over the place won't do you much good. What you need are 'organic links' - real people linking to your site, because it's related to theirs and they're interested in your content.

Improving your Ranking

How do you improve your page's ranking? Well, based on that, all you need are more high quality incoming links from other similar websites. Simple :)

How do I get more high quality incoming links?

The best way to get more people to link to your stuff, is to write interesting things that people will want to read and want to link to. Build it and they will come.