Search Engine Optimization

Some Thoughts on SEO

Search engines are a lot like people

Search engines employ complex, proprietary algorithms to construct their rankings. Although few people know precisely how they work, it's generally agreed that a site designed to acommodate human visitors will fare well with the web-crawling robots. With that (and your high school English teacher) in mind, use a "reverse pyramid" structure when writing for the web: define each page with a broad topic and work your way down to the specifics. If a site is well-written and user-friendly, then search engine success is within reach.

Hierarchy and other codification concerns

Optimized sites comprise well-structured pages

Robots like structure. The text of a web page is outlined in code and that code is the structure seen by search engines. If they can't make sense of your code then they aren't going to like your site. So give them what they want and they might be good to you. Feed them hierarchy, lists, and CSS layout.

Choose the right words

An accent accident

To write for the web, it is advantageous to utilize words that people are likely to search for and to spell them correctly... most of the time. I built a site for a fantastic Mexican restaurant in Irvine named "Taléo". I carefully put "Taléo" in the page titles and throughout the site but I couldn't get it to come up in search. It was driving me nuts. And then I realized: no one –at least no one looking for Mexican food in Irvine– is going to search for a word with an "é" in it; they are going to search for "Taleo". I took the accent out of the site and it solved the problem almost immediately.