Content is the core of on-site search engine optimization.

• You must provide useful information that people will seek.
• This information should incorporate words and phrases that people will actually use when searching for what you offer.
• Such words or phrases must be specific enough to distinguish your content from others.
• But…these words should also be generally used and understood by your target audience.

Word choice and SEO: striking the right balance

The above guidelines seem rather obvious, but it's often hard to find that sweet spot between a phrase like auto racing—which is so broad it will generate 32,300,000 search results—and a phrase such as "subaqueous auto racing" which generated 0 results at the time I wrote this. (Note: because I've used this phrase repeatedly, this page will probably soon become the 1 result for the term...unless some of you go out and create competing content.)

Here on the Web Development Blog, as you know, I write about topics related to Web development. In an ideal world I'd rank well for the phrase Web development but it's too common. It can also mean different things to different people. I'm a long-time blogger, but I only make a few posts per month so I can't compete with Wikipedia and other major players on such a frequently used term. But if I get more specific, I can do well. Today this blog came in 4th out of 231,000,000 results for web development blog. My old blog (which links to this one) comes in 7th, so for now at least I'm getting two good results for that phrase.

Write first for readers, then for SEO

While robots crawl the Web, they do so to help people.

I didn't get these search results by analyzing my site and stuffing the phrase "Web development blog" every place I could find. I just used the term in the most obvious places: in the section title, the primary menu, and anywhere it naturally fit in the text. If you write for humans (rather than robots) you'll naturally include many of the relevant words and phrases in your text, but you may still need to do a bit of fine-tuning to match your vocabulary to your readers.

When we're writing for the Web, we're usually writing about subjects with which we are very familiar. We may use specialized vocabulary that makes sense to us, but isn't used by our readers. This could include technical terms pertinent to the field, regional terms specific to where we live or even phrases specific to our organization.

In order to make sure that our copy is both easily understood and easily found via search, we need to take a step back and read/edit the content with our readers in mind.

Choosing reader-friendly phrases for SEO—an example from higher education

Colleges, universities and other non-profit organizations all depend on fund-raising to serve their missions. Some organizations call their fundraising departments "Advancement." Others use "Development" or "Philanthropy." Alas those outside the non-profit world, including many potential donors, don't see those terms in the same way as insiders. Someone involved in manufacturing may think of "Development" in terms of product development. A recent graduate may consider "Philanthropy" to be the realm of the rich—and not realize it also includes his/her $25 donation to the annual fund.

Schools that use simpler phrases such as "make a gift for XYZ" or "give to XYZ" make it easier for donors to find their giving pages. For example, if I Google give to Dartmouth, the first result takes me to their Why Give page which also includes a direct link to their online giving page.

Why worry about SEO when we link to Giving (or whatever) from the home page?

If I know that I want to find something on a particular site, I'll just type the address in the url, then use the navigation or on-site search to find what I seek. I'm not everyone. I know many people who will use the Google search bar even when they know a site's address. Dartmouth alumni and friends may very well Google "Give to Dartmouth" rather than going to http://www.dartmouth.edu to look for the Giving link. Thus it's helpful that Dartmouth ranks #1 on that phrase. Organizations that have large sites—common in academia, Dartmouth has more than 300,000 publicly indexed pages—rely heavily on on-site search because they offer so much information.

Taking advantage of long tail search terms

Horses have long tails, so can you.

While a phrase like give to Dartmouth is both specific and direct, we can also get good results from phrases that are more unique. Awhile back, in SEO - keywords do the darndest things I asked if you were getting traffic from unusual words or phrases you didn't expect. My friend Wayne mentioned, via Twitter, that he gets traffic on phrases we might not want to repeat. David commented that he is getting good results for "Long haired guinea pigs."

I just looked at my analytics again and am now getting results on click here, have you tried jargon and rt hacool. These actually appear in my top 10 which surprised me, but these are still logical. I've written posts advising against using click here and against business jargon, and hacool is my Twitter ID. (rt stands for reTweet which means to forward someone's message on Twitter.)

While these and more general phrases such as "Web development blog" or "blog website tutorial" appear among the top 10 phrases bringing traffic to my site, niche-specific phrases make a significant impact. The phrase quantify and visualize twitter search results produced 5 visits from people who spent an average of 16:50 minutes on the site and visited an average of 7.6 pages.

Admittedly, 5 visits isn't many. But when you also get 2 for how to start redesigning your web site, 3 for cool html blog, etc. they start to add up. People visit this site via almost 2,000 keyword combinations (many of which may be variations on a theme). The top phrases may bring hundreds of visits each, but when added together it's the little niche terms that bring in the majority of traffic. The collective success of these individually smaller elements is what is meant by the long tail.

Woohoo! My site has the #1 spot for "subaqueous auto racing"

While niche phrases produce traffic, they still need to be relevant to our content. When Google indexes this page, it may get the #1 spot for "subaqueous auto racing." But placing high in search results is only half the battle. Such results only matter if people are searching on that term AND if I provide useful information on the topic. You and I both know that this article is about word choice and SEO. So if anyone searches that phrase hoping to learn about underwater car racing, they will be sorely disappointed and leave the site. Some marketers like to brag about making the first page of search results, but if the phrase doesn't bring visitors it isn't helping.

When editing copy for SEO it's easy to get wound up worrying about what phrases you should rank for, but if you write for your readers and apply common sense, you'll start to see meaningful results.

SEO Keywords and Phrases Resources

• Fast keyword Research With Google's Wonder Wheel
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Google Webmaster Tools: SEO
• How to Find and Target Long Tail Keywords for More Search Engine Traffic
• Researching Longtail Keywords with Google Adwords
• SEO Advice for Bloggers, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

heidicool.com is also on Facebook

Need more Web tips? Fan the heidicool.com Facebook page. I'm posting 1 tip/link there per day to offer ongoing advice on Web design, marketing and social media—without overwhelming your Facebook stream.

Postscript: Google works fast!

As of 3:50 p.m. e.d.t today, September 10, 2009, this page did come in at #1 for subaqueous auto racing. Here's the screencapture of the Google results page. I have a Greasemonkey script installed on Firefox that also includes Twitter results. As a result of looking this up I'm now also finding reTweets and links I didn't yet know about.

Sample page using semantic mark-up as viewed in Firefox.

Sample page using non-semantic mark-up as viewed in Firefox. Give or take a few pixels these look pretty much the same.

Sample page using semantic mark-up as viewed in Internet Explorer 6. As you can see, the banner breaks in IE 6 but everything else looks pretty much as expected. The page also breaks in IE 7 and IE 8 though the IE 8 version looks different. I've included these samples as a reminder to always check sites in multiple browsers.

Sample page using non-semantic mark-up as viewed in Internet Explorer 6. Again it looks almost the same at the semantic version, even breaking in the same manner.

The other day, Aaron Rester posed this question on Twitter: Webbies: any advice on explaining semantic HTML to non-webbies?

I wrote back that I usually show them some source code and walk them through things like using h1 and so forth for headers. That is what I usually do. In fact I'd just done that the other day when I was showing someone the changes I would recommend for search engine optimization (SEO).

But the question made me wonder if my explanations were adequate. If someone doesn't know anything about HTML or other mark-up languages, will such an explanation make sense? Or is there a better way to explain the differences between structural and presentational mark-up to clients and new Web designers?

Why do clients and other non-webbies need to know about semantic HTML?

Typically this topic comes up most often when one is discussing issues related to search optimization and accessibility. If a client needs to enhance their site for SEO, I may be recommending changes to the code that they won't even see when looking at the page in their browser. Understandably they will want to know why they should pay me to do things to their site that they won't notice. The changes we make may not be visually apparent, but they will convey additional information to Web browsers and search engines that can aid accessibility, usability and searchability.

What is semantic HTML?

Semantics is the study of meaning. Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary provides us with a definition that relates closely to how the term is applied to HTML "3 a : the meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs; especially : connotative meaning." HTML uses elements that convey structural meaning to Web browsers and other user agents such as search engine crawlers.

Writing a page in semantic HTML simply means that you are applying the appropriate structural elements to the various bits of content on a page. Huh? Code elements act like labels that tell the Web browser what each section of content is. HTML gives us structural elements to indicate headers, paragraphs, lists, tables and so forth. If I want to tell the browser to start a new paragraph, I'll type <p>. If I want to start a new subhead, I'll type <h5>.

Then isn't all HTML semantic?

You would think so, but no. Web browsers can be both fussy and forgiving. I can code the same content in multiple ways that will each look very similar when viewed, but will actually convey differing amounts of information to user agents.

Instead of using an <h5> I could use <p><strong>in front of my subhead and make it look the same as it would using <h5>. Such usage would be considered presentational mark-up. It can affect how the header looks, but it is not semantically correct because it doesn't let user agents know that this is a subhead. If a Web designer applies the incorrect elements to page content, the site may look perfectly acceptable. But it is not passing on vital information that user agents may need to:

• Help a visually impaired visitor navigate the page using screen reading software.
• Tell Google and other search engines what topics are the most important ones on the page.
• Show that you are citing a reference document such as a book.
• Indicate that you are presenting computer code, etc.

Same content, different mark-up

To illustrate this point I've created 2 very simple Web pages, one uses semantic mark-up and one using non-semantic mark-up. Basically the non-semantic version uses <p> for just about everything. When you view the pages through a regular browser you'll see that the semantic and non-semantic versions look pretty similar. They both look normal in Firefox, Safari and Opera, and they both break in various versions of Internet Explorer. You don't see the difference visually until you look at the pages in the text browser, Lynx.

When viewing the semantic page on Lynx, we can see that there is order to the page; it looks a bit like an outline. The menu looks like a menu and the headers standout to provide an introduction to the other text.

HTML elements in action, offering added information to user agents

Text readers for the visually impaired and search engine spiders are getting even more information than we can see in the Lynx semantic html example. They know that each menu link should be distinguished from the next. The use of an unordered list for the menu tells user agents to separate these links in a way that use of <p> does not, and allows users of screen readers to jump through or skip these elements to proceed to the main text. In the non-semantic version this is not clear, a text reader may speak all of those links together, making it more difficult for the user to navigate.

These user agents can also tell that the first header is more important than the second because it has been coded as an <h3> while the second header is an <h4>. Headers are ranked in order of importance from 1-6. Here we're using an <h1> for the site name, the most important header on the page. Search engine crawlers will see words in an <h1> as being more descriptive of the page as a whole. This is useful for search engine optimization, because we can include our keywords and phrases in our various headers to let the search engines know that core topics we are covering on the page. Thus on this page you'll notice that I've used the phrase "semantic HTML" in both the text and subheads (which in this case are <h5>'s.) That said I've not used it in every subhead because having these headers make sense to you, the reader, is still more important than SEO. People come first, then robots.

In this example I've focused on just a few a few of the many HTML elements that are important to semantic mark-up, but hopefully these will give you a clearer sense of how such usage can help SEO and accessibility. Other elements such as address, cite and blockquote can add additional meaning to a page's code. You can learn more about other elements and related issues in the reference links below.

Semantic mark-up, validation and content

It's always a good practice to validate your code to check for errors and potential problems, but site validation doesn't guarantee that you've used the best mark-up for the site. While the validator can make sure you've used allowed elements, it has no way of knowing if you've them in the most appropriate manner. Both the semantic and non-semantic page samples used in this post were produced using valid W3C standards compliant XHTML and CSS. One is clearly better formed than the other, but both also break in Internet Explorer.

Thus it's also important to check sites in multiple browsers and to simply think carefully about how visitors will read the site. If my samples were for real sites, I'd fix the IE problem, but I used it here to remind us that using valid semantic code is just the beginning. There will always be additional details we must consider.

It's also worth noting that, when it comes to SEO, a semantically well-formed site is not a substitute for good content. Search engines such as Google are designed to help users, like you and me, find the most relevant pages for the information we seek. With that goal in mind they have to accommodate a wide variety of coding differences. If your competitor has great content and plenty of good inbound links, while yours does not, then his/her site will still win out, even if the code is atrocious. But if you can produce great content and present it in the appropriate format you will be off to a good start.

Semantic HTML Resources

• The Elements of Meaningful XHTML (presentation showing examples)
• Fangs Screen Reader Emulator
• Guide to Semantic Use of HTML Elements
• Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act Implementation Guidelines for Web-Based Information and Applications 1.0
• More than one H1 on a page: good or bad? (Video by Google's Matt Cutts)
• Semantics in HTML 5
• W3C Semantic Data Extractor
• W3C: G115: Using semantic elements to mark up structure

Rather than leaving you with a file not found error, I'll turn this into an experiment. The note I left to myself was:

"keywords must rank high, but also be used by real people to find your stuff. intro to longtail, etc."

My plan is to dig into the idea that you can rank well for a phrase that seems useful and have it not bring traffic. Or you can rank well on a longtail phrase that seems so bizarre you wouldn't expect it to bring any traffic at all. For example try Googling Bill is Braising Shrimp. I used this phrase in a recent blog entry. It's an odd combination of words, so I'm not surprised that I rank high on it. But it's also brought 43 visitors this month. That is not something I would have expected.

What about you? Have you found SEO success through phrases you might not expect? Do you have tips you'd like to share with people trying to hone in on keywords as they develop their content? Is there anything you would like me to discuss as I elaborate on the topic?

I look forward to hearing from you!

The above Flash animation file is a mini-Web site used for demonstration purposes. Were it standing on its own a user would see it as a multi-page site with an introductory animation and a menu used to navigate to interior pages.

For those of you who don't have, or cannot see Flash content, the introductory page has a circle that morphs into a square, triangle and back again. The shapes careen up to the menu offering a choice of a circle, triangle and square to click on. When clicked each page takes you to a page with a bit of motion and simple definitions for the shapes.

Flash is a powerful tool. As designers we can use it to create motion, control typography, animate objects, create scalable graphics, embed videos, create slideshows, etc. Some find it so useful that they design entire sites using Flash.

I don't.*

Flash offers great control for designers but it also poses obstacles for users and hinders our Web marketing strategies. Adobe has made great strides in terms of making Flash files both more accessible and searchable, but there is still more progress to be made. Today I'd like to discuss why I advise against using Flash for overall site architecture.

Remember the problems with frames?

Years ago, before we had better tools available, designers flocked to frames because they made it easy to include constant headers and menus. Once you built those fixed unchanging files, all you had to do was create extra files for the content. This seemed cool until we noticed that frames broke the user experience. Individual pages couldn't be bookmarked because the address never changed. While the content would change within the page, the visitor technically remained on the same page of the site.

This was bad from a marketing standpoint, because it inconvenienced visitors and made it difficult for them to link to specific pages on our sites from their own sites. As site owners we rely on incoming links to drive traffic directly to our pages and to enhance our search results. Google and the other search engines consider these links in their algorithms, so more links mean higher placement in search engine results pages. While some may still debate the issue, it didn't take long for most of the design world to conclude that frames caused more problems than they solved.

Flash is like frames— on a Flash based site the address never changes

When we create Flash based-sites, we do so by embedding a Flash file within a regularly constructed HTML file. When we include a Flash file, such as the animation on this page or a YouTube video, it's easy to see that it's just one element within a page. On a Flash-based site, the Flash element is the only thing the visitor sees.

All the navigation and interaction happens within the Flash animation itself. Visitors may click on menu links to visit new pages, just as they would on a regular site, but they don't actually go to a different page. The content changes so the page appears to be a new page but as was true with frames, the page address doesn't change. (One could build a Flash site using separate .swf and .html files for each page, but it's not common practice.)

Shapes - Taking a closer look at a Flash-based site.

I've published the Shapes Flash file from this page separately as a stand-alone site, so you can get a better sense of how this works. If you visit http://www.heidicool.com/flash/shapes.html you will see that it acts like a typical 5 page Web site with a home page and internal content pages. It begins with a simple animation of shapes then you are presented with a menu of a circle, triangle and square. If you click on a shape you go to a page with a short definition of the shape you clicked.

But if you watch the address bar you'll see that the address never changes. If you blog about squares and want to link to the page about squares you can't. Instead you'd have to link to the main page and include a note for users to follow the square link. If including such a description is inconvenient, you probably won't bother to link at all.

The Flash SEO conundrum

If you look at the analytics for your own site you will quickly realize that your incoming links do not all go to your home page. Instead site owners link directly to the page that will be of interest to their readers.

Thus, each page on your site gives you a new opportunity for search engine optimization. If I'd built the Shapes site in HTML, I could be sure to use the keyword "square" in a header element as well as the text on the square page, focus on triangles on the triangle page, etc. Doing so would make it easier for the search engines to find these pages and would also make it possible for other site owners to link to individual pages. This is one aspect of SEO that is a numbers game. A site with more pages creates more opportunities for links and keyword searches—thus resulting in more traffic.

A one-page Flash site has a distinct disadvantage for SEO.

As with any site, I built the Shapes site with SEO in mind. The site validates as XHTML 1.0 strict, and I included a page description and keywords (which Google ignores but others may use) and gave it a unique title. I know that Google has improved how it indexes Flash content, so it will index the text within the pages (since I didn't break apart the text), but it won't know which text elements are most important—since Flash doesn't use semantic mark-up such as headers and paragraphs. I could have included a header element in the HTML, but like the title and page description it would remain the same on each page and wouldn't help me optimize for the individual page topics. These details may help my SEO but they aren't enough to compensate for the sites key weakness. It is still only one page.

Flash and accessibility

Adobe provides an accessibility resource center for Flash and other Adobe products. It provides a number of useful tips and guidelines for making Flash more accessible to those with visual and hearing impairments. If a designer follows the guidelines, and the site visitor has the right browser or screen reader, this can greatly enhance the Flash experience. But some of these guidelines are complicated—there's far more to it than providing alternative text for audio and visual elements— and I suspect there are many of us who don't understand them fully. I don't know how many users have the appropriate screen readers to take advantage of Adobe's accessibility features, so I also have to assume that some do not.

When I use Flash, I try to stick to the basics and offer some sort of alternative content. In my photo gallery pages, I use Flash, javascript and xml to display my photos as a navigable slide show. Each slide show includes alternative text describing the types of photos I've included. That seems the most direct way to handle purely visual elements such as photographs.

On the Shapes site I wrote a description of the site as my alternative content. Users who can't use Flash will see the description instead. This is adequate for this project as it conveys enough information to let visitors know what the example includes. But it would not be sufficient for a larger site. My alternative description applies to the whole site, because the whole site is contained within one page. If I had more content to describe I'd be better served by providing an alternative HTML version of the site, so that I could provide each pages text content individually. By building sites in HTML instead of Flash I can avoid this problem and just build one version of the site.

Conclusion

Flash is great when used in the right context. Whether we're embedding slideshows or making animated cartoons, Flash lets us add some very useful features to our sites. But if you want to attract visitors and increase readership, building the entire site in Flash can be more trouble than it's worth. I'll discuss Flash further in my follow-up article pertaining to Flash and the user experience.

Flash SEO and Accessibility resources

• Accessibility and Usability of Flash for Users with Disabilities
• Adobe Flash Accessibility: Best Practices for Design (Added Aug. 28, 2009 - nice walk through of accessibility issues)
• Adobe Flash CS4 Professional accessibility
• Adobe Search Engine Optimization Technology Center
• Flash and SEO - Compelling Reasons Why Search Engines & Flash Still Don't Mix
• Flash as a choice, not a default
• Search-Friendly Flash?

* There are of course limited exceptions. I built the Commencement March animation in Flash because the project required movement to convey what was happening. The site was built primarily for use as a training presentation and was linked to from the commencement site so it didn't have the usual marketing requirements.

Monday I started redesigning a site that I'd first built in 2003. Tuesday I received today's mission from Problogger's 31 Days to Build a Better Blog project: "Write a list post." Somewhere in my brain these thoughts collided, so today I thought I'd share some of the core issues I consider when working on a redesign project.

Why do you want to redesign your Web site?

Hint: The answer is not "because the old site is old and boring and I'm sick of looking at it. I want something new." A lot of site owners use this line of reasoning, but we have to keep in mind that we're designing sites for our visitors, not ourselves. If you're thinking about redesigning a site, take stock of the old one.

Look at your site analytics and read your visitor feedback to gauge what is or isn't working. As Cameron Moll wrote in 2005, Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign, so it is up to you determine which changes will enhance your site and which are change for the mere sake of change.

Web site goals

You've heard me wax forth about goals in my Planning Your Web Site Tutorial, so you already know that you have to set specific goals to develop content and measure results. Presumably you did that when you first built the site. But things change over time. Does your original goal still apply? Or is it time to focus on something else? For the site I'm working on now, the goal remains the same, but the scope has expanded. The site was developed to market one product. Now the company has 9 products in 3 product lines. These lines have related, but slightly different target audiences. So while the site still has a goal to sell widgets, it must now be adapted to appeal to a broader audience.

That site had, and continues to have, a clear objective. Such objectives are easy to determine for small commercial sites. For others it is more difficult. Most of us want our sites to do it all: sell more widgets, increase brand recognition, make coffee, etc. But if we try to tackle too much we'll never develop a clear vision. Instead try to focus on one primary objective. What do you want the site to accomplish this year? Is this the same objective you had originally or have situations changed in such a way that you should now focus on something else?

Let's say you're the chair of the philosophy department at University X. You have an interest in applying philosophical thinking to real-world scenarios and want to add more interdisciplinary classes—covering topics such as cognition and intellectual property. Doing so will require more faculty—and the funding to hire them. To make a case for this you must demonstrate a demand for these courses, a demand that can be shown if there is an increase in the number of students taking philosophy classes or, better yet, selecting philosophy as their major.

You have several weighty goals for the department, but if you establish student recruitment as the primary goal of your Web site, you are one step closer to achieving the rest.

Content: What information must you provide to support your goal?

Given that you already have a site, you may have existing content that will also serve your goal. That said it can be distracting to sort through what exists and what doesn't. Instead come up with a new outline based on the new goal. You can then use that to determine what old content to keep or revise, what content to create anew, and how the content should be organized.

For our philosophy site we can consider our recruitment goal by asking the following types of questions. What do students need to know about philosophy to decide if it is right for them? What are the features of the program? What benefits will it provide? What are the requirements?

Students must be given sufficient information to determine if the subject is right for them or not. Philosophy seems vague and esoteric to many, so the site should define the topic, the skill sets used in studying it and the benefits gained from its study. In our current economy, when many choose a major based on how it will help them find a job, it's also helpful to show the practical value of studying philosophy.

I majored in Philosophy because I found it intriguing. I'm the kind of nerd who liked the story problems in algebra; I see the world as a series of puzzles. The study of philosophy gave me a new approach to solving these puzzles, a framework through which I could approach problem solving from a variety of vantage points. I later discovered that this type of critical thinking applies as much to marketing and Web design as it does to hypothetical questions of ethics and meaning.

Prospective students and their parents may not yet know this. My parents supported my choice as they were already strong supporters of a classic liberal arts education. But they had friends who weren't. Vocal friends who asked things like "What are you going to do with a degree in philosophy, sit on a mountain top dispensing wisdom?

In this day and age it's not enough to show that philosophy builds critical thinking skills that can be applied to all aspects of life. People are more skeptical about spending money on a degree that doesn't seem as practical as one in business or engineering. To counter such obstacles you'll need to show exactly how the philosophical method can be applied to the real world. Examples of logical fallacies used in advertising, or ethical questions regarding file-sharing, help demonstrate how the specific reasoning skills learned in the study of philosophy can be applied in real life.

Whether your goal is to share information or sell more widgets, it's important to think about the audience. What information do they require to make the choice to do what you wish them to do? Get into their heads, consider the goal from their perspective, do market research, then apply what you've learned to developing your content.

Content formats: how can we most effectively convey this information?

These days people are anxious to add video and interactivity to their sites to show that they are keeping up with the latest technologies. But video isn't appropriate for everything. Think about the content first and let that help you determine its format. Will you be including a list of available philosophy classes and course descriptions on the site? How would you present that? Would you show a video of Professor Smith reading the course descriptions? Or would you present the information as text? I'd go with text.

How is a philosophy class different than one in math or history? Would it help students to see a class in action? Perhaps this is the time to videotape Professor Smith. If he's known for leading dynamic class discussions, ask him if he'd let you video tape a few seminars. This allows you to share his expertise and knowledge with the public while also letting prospective students see what a philosophy class is like.

Do you want to include educational resources on ethics or logic that will teach students about the field while also enticing their interest? Perhaps you could create a blog or discussion forum in which you pose questions so that readers can respond.

If you think carefully about the information you wish to share and what site visitors should do with it, you'll soon find yourself choosing content formats that are far more appropriate than some talking head yammering at a camera.

Organization/navigation

Once you've come up with a list of the content, and content formats, you will need to support your specific goal, you can organize it into an outline or site map that will guide you in organizing the content and navigational structure of the site. As before try not to look too much to your old site for guidance at first. Instead look at your outline with fresh eyes. Put yourself in the mind of your target audience, and see which content items form logical content clusters.

Then, when your new outline is complete, compare it to the old site. Is the new structure completely different? Or are there only slight variations? This will help you determine whether your revised site will need a new menu system or just some minor adjustments. Also look at your site analytics. Are there pages on the current site that are important but don't get enough traffic? Are those pages hard to find? Is the content less than compelling? Will your new outline make it easier for visitors to find and view these pages?

Whether our new site will be redesigned entirely, or modified slightly, we can learn a lot from the statistics for our old site. They can show us the pathways visitors use to get to specific pages, the amount of time people spend on pages, and which pages they are likely to use as exits from our site. If certain pathways are often used we can try to maintain them so that we don't break anything that is currently working well.

The pages our visitors spend the most time on are typically the most important. If they're not on your new site outline, you may wish to add them. Are there important pages (to you) on the old site that visitors don't spend time viewing? Do these pages support your new goal? If so consider how you can make these easier to find and improve the content so they provide more value to visitors.

Technology/code

Ideally your old site was built in W3C standards compliant HTML using semantic mark-up. If so it will make it far easier to re-use any of the old content you intend to keep. If not, here is your opportunity to clean things up. Whether you are making significant design changes or minor alterations this project will probably involve edits to every page. Given that, it's a good chance to make some changes.

Did your old site use a table-based layout? Did you use bolded paragraph elements instead of headers? If so, try recoding your site using CSS and semantic mark-up. This will both clean up your code (so you're not stuck trying to make sense of all those old nested tables) and help with search engine optimization (SEO).

Also consider how technology has changed and what new options are available through your hosting provider. For example I used to use SSI (server-side includes) to include repeating elements such as headers, menus and footers. I'm now using PHP which also makes it easier to create unique page titles based on my page headers. If your content will include new features such as videos and interactivity, research the best methods for presenting these. Perhaps a content management system or blogging software would help. For my project I'm using WordPress. This makes it easier for me to group items by category and generate RSS feeds and will allow the client to post event and product announcements.

Your needs will vary, but if you take the time now to determine what the best practices are for the features you'll require, you'll find that the site is easier to rebuild and maintain.

Graphic Design

People assume that a redesign means a change in the visual look and feel of the site. But how much you change depends on your goals. Does the current look support your corporate identity and brand? Does it work with the new goal? Does it support the navigational scheme of the new site plan? Do visitors like it? If so, a dramatic change may not be necessary, it may in fact cause confusion. If this is the case you may want to just tweak things here and there to support the new structure.

On the other hand, if you've changed your logo, the old design doesn't serve the new goals or if your site looks like it was built by someone's 10 year old nephew, then yes, change is in order. Let the new goal and your brand identity lead the way.

I take a fairly minimalist approach to design. I don't want flashy graphics and images to compete with the message. Instead I want them to augment the message. But the header image on the site I'm redesigning focuses on only one product. Now that there are more products I'm changing the header graphics and color scheme to better reflect the theme of the full product line. For example, if my site had originally been about grapes, I might have had pictures of grapes and vineyards on the site. But if the company now sells a variety of fruits, my imagery must reflect that.

There's neither time nor space here to fully discuss design theory, but as you work on your new design concepts, keep your visitors in mind. Your favorite color may be hot pink, but your site is meant for your visitors so choose color schemes and readable typography that make it easy for them.

Marketing

Build your new site with marketing in mind. Properly marked-up code, and the use of keywords in your content (especially headers) will improve SEO, thus making your site more easily found in the future. Avoid technology choices, such as using Flash for your entire site, that don't support SEO, page linking, bookmarking, cross-browser compatibility, etc.

Compare your new site plan to the old. Try to keep the old file structure intact as much as possible. If your site has been around for awhile, then others are already linking to your pages and those pages are ranked in Google and other search engines. You don't want to lose what you've already established, so if you can avoid moving old pages, that will help. If you must move or delete old pages, then use 301 redirects to guide visitors seamlessly to the new pages.

When you launch the new site, consider this an opportunity to re-connect with your visitors. If appropriate, poll your visitors before and after the redesign process to get their input. People hate change but they like to feel included. It's impossible to design a site that will appeal to everyone, but if you have access to user input, it will help you design a site best suited to your audience.

When the site is ready, you might also send an e-mail, announcing the launch to your existing user base. Some people will praise you, some will opt-out, and some will complain. Respond to the complaints in a timely and thoughtful manner. You may have annoyed them with your changes, but you've also started a conversation with someone who cares enough about your site, product or service to voice their opinion. Keep them onboard by responding to their issues.

As with any Web development project, there are far more details to consider, but I hope these have provided you with a good starting point for your next redesign. If you focus on the goals and the needs of your site visitors you'll be well on your way.

Web Design and Development Resources

• 10 Tips to a Successful Web site Redesign
• Daniel Burka on Iterative Design (video)
• The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs
• Understanding Web Design
• Usability First: Web site design

Edu Blogger Scholarship Update

Thanks to everyone who read Learning for fun and adventure: online education comes in many flavors. Through your support I made it to the finals! If you're interested in higher education and related topics, you may want to peruse the blogs of the other finalists. You'll find some good reads there. (Which means I've got some stiff competition.)

At some point in the past you revamped your site for search engine optimization (SEO). Now it's time to measure your results, and share them with your client or development team. These people come from a variety of backgrounds. Some of the marketers will be perfectly happy to look at your Google Analytics page or stare at your graphs and spreadsheets. Others will quietly gaze at your numbers and wonder (to themselves) what any of this means—and they might not ask you for clarification.

This provides us with a teaching moment that we can use to enhance our SEO in the future. Rather than sending out a dry report or giving a presentation that falls on deaf ears, use this as an opportunity to remind people of what it is you are trying to achieve.

What are we trying to accomplish with SEO?

All we're trying to do with SEO is to make our sites more findable through search engines. The point is to optimize our site content and code in a manner that allows people with some interest in our organization, product, content or services to easily find our site, and the information they seek, when using search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

It's important to remind your team that SEO is not an end goal. It will not get students to apply to your program, buy your widgets or drink your Kool-Aid. But it will bring more traffic—from those with an interest in your stuff—to your site so that your content can encourage them to do those things.

How do we measure SEO?

If our SEO strategy is working we should see an increase in

• traffic from search engines
• time spent on site by search engine visitors
• conversions (search engine visitors attending your events, signing up for your classes, buying your rhinestone studded earmuffs, etc.)

These are the core things to review. To learn more, visit the sites listed at the bottom of this entry.

What's working and what's not

Swim with Sea Turtles while studying marine biology

You've looked at those numbers and everything's gone up. Yay! Or perhaps it hasn't. Boo! How can you tell what's performing well and what needs to be improved? This is where your keywords come into play. If our point is to bring in qualified traffic—people more likely to enroll in our marine ecology program or donate to our new cosmology research center—then that traffic will come from people who have searched on words and phrases related to marine ecology or cosmology.

If what they find on our site matches what they were seeking they are more likely to enroll, donate, etc.

Google analytics, and other such programs provide quantifiable data on key words and phrases used, the number of visits per word or phrase, average time spent on site by those visitors, average number of pages visited, etc. The top 10 phrases for my blog for the past month were:

• tone in writing
• writing tone
• browser testing
• web development blog
• logo
• tone of writing
• social media networking
• add caption to photo in css
• writers tone
• converting word doc to html

I can learn a lot from this (and the rest of the report listing 3,007 words or phrases.) In reviewing this data I'll consider:

Does my site offer the content described in these phrases?

Yes, although my entries about a logo are outdated, the other topics continue to be relevant and I know from past experience that my articles on tone and writing are my most popular pages.

Does my content provide the information users seek?

Yes, they are spending enough time on the pages to read them. If visitors came for 10 seconds and left I would know that they were looking for something different, and that I should reword some things to draw in more relevant traffic and to not waste the time of visitors who clearly want something else.

Are expected terms missing from the list?

No. But if I'd written the definitive post on the eating habits of owls and didn't find any listings for bird, eating, diet, owl, etc. then I'd know I have to edit that article and do some research to determine the most effective key words to include.

Using Wordle word clouds to visualize the results.

I'm the kind of nerd that is perfectly content to spend time poking about in spreadsheets. But 3,007 phrases are still a lot to swallow, and those are just for my little blog. If you have a large university or corporate site your list could be exponentially larger.

Also, people don't all search the same way. They use variations on the same terms. In my list we have 4 variations on writing and tone. If I want to quantify those properly it means merging terms together adding up the combined results etc. How much data you need to quantify depends on your needs, but in many cases you just need to get a sense of which terms are prominent and which are not. This will help your content producers so they can edit their copy to enhance the results in the future.

To get a quicker sense of what's working, I like to copy my results into http://www.wordle.net which let's me create a word cloud of the terms, as shown in the two examples below. Terms showing up more frequently are larger while infrequent terms are smaller. Word clouds can be especially helpful in presentations and reports because they make it easy for readers with varying skill sets to get the point.

In this first example, I copied all phrases that generated 20 or more visits to the site so I could focus on the most frequently used phrases. (This narrowed the list to just a bit over 100). I also removed terms like "of" or "and" so that I could focus on keywords only.

As you can see, "tone" and "writing" show up prominently, as we'd expect from our list. The other words that are easily read are also things I've written about, and it would be easy to notice if a topic I was trying to promote was missing.

Watch for irrelevant results

While it's most important to make sure that our topics show up, it's also important to watch for words we're not trying to promote. If, for example, I saw "Beluga whales" in large letters, and I'd only mentioned them casually in passing it would mean that I was bringing in a lot of people who wanted to learn more about whales. While traffic is good, misguided traffic is not. The people who want to know about whales could care less about my thoughts on Web development so there is no reason for me to waste their time. If that term showed up here I would want to rewrite my article to reduce the number of times I mention Beluga whales.

Fine tuning your word cloud

While this first Wordle word cloud is helpful, it's not overly precise. Some terms, such as "development," are smaller than I might expect. That's because my content wasn't weighted. My analytics report gave me both a list of phrases and the number of times they were used. I pasted in the phrases but not proportionally to their frequency of use. The words that are larger are showing up that way only because they were used in a variety of search phrases. Huh?

"Tone in writing" generated 949 visits in a given time period. "Flash embed script" generated 20. For my Wordle to more accurately reflect the frequency in which these terms were used, I'd need to paste the phrases in as many times as they were used, or in a smaller, but proportional, amount.

To determine how many times to paste in each phrase, I put all the phrases and their frequencies in a spreadsheet similar to the following table. I was only using phrases that brought 20 or more visits so my lowest frequency is 20. If I divide each of my frequencies by a factor of 20, then round the results to a whole number, I come up with a manageable number of phrases to paste.

Phrase Frequency Table

To make my improved Wordle, I pasted "tone writing" in 47 times, "writing tone" 21 times, etc. as indicated by the chart. This rendered an accurate cloud, but "writing" and "tone" were so enormous that you could barely read anything else. To improve readability, I deleted several copies of those phrases so they were still dominant but not so much that you'd need a magnifying glass to read the other words.

This word cloud provides a more accurate representation of the frequency in which these words and phrases bring traffic to the site. When reporting to your client or team you can use such a word cloud to easily show which words are pulling in traffic and which are missing. This visual representation makes it easy for everyone to see what's going on, even those not fond of graphs and spreadsheets.

If you find that it takes too much time to generate the second version of the cloud, the first version is still helpful. You just have to remember that it's not as precise.

An educated Web team is an effective Web team

SEO can be confusing to both clients and other members of your team. A client may have overly optimistic expectations. A writer may not fully understand why you keep pushing them to use key words and phrases. But if you can teach them about SEO basics and give examples of what you are trying to accomplish, you can set realistic goals and ensure that all members of the team contribute to the success of the project.

More articles on measuring SEO

• Are You Measuring SEO Success Correctly?
• How to Measure SEO Success
• Measuring SEO Success: Solve Personalized Search Misperceptions
• Measuring SEO Success With Web Analytics (Good intro for those new to Web analytics)
• Measuring SEO: why rankings are worthless
• What Google's Matt Cutts Sees In 2009

Looking for more educational resources? Check out Learning for fun and adventure: online education comes in many flavors for sites that will entertain your brain.

Over the past weeks, I've been getting a lot of questions and comments about URLs and naming conventions. Here are a few typical queries:

• Department X has the address http://departmentx.case.edu. Our address is http://www.case.edu/school/foobar/
  foobar.html. Can you change our address to http://foobar.case.edu?
• How can we get a shorter address for our page? Our long URL is wreaking havoc with our marketing.
• Our site has a long address that we've been printing in our mailings. We're not getting as much traffic as we hoped because the name is too long to type. How can we shorten it?

Today I'll address the first question, relating to subdomains, then continue the discussion on naming conventions in an upcoming article.

Subdomains: http://yourname.case.edu vs. http://www.case.edu/yourname vs. http://www.case.edu/your division/yourname

Here at Case we use a a hierarchical naming structure, featuring addresses such as http://www.case.edu/your division/yourname, on the main Case Web server. Subdomains, addresses such as http://yourname.case.edu, are used by Web sites housed on other servers because this is the most efficient way to include such sites within the case.edu domain. Subdomains aren't by nature special or better, they simply provide a technical solution to a technical problem. Sites housed on the main Case server cannot be changed to have subdomain addresses, but that's okay, there is no advantage to doing so. My former colleague, Kevin Adams, explains this in detail in his article Subdomains vs. Accounts - Case's Naming Conventions.

On personal and business sites subdomains are typically used when content resides on a different server or when content is topically distinctive from the main site—but not so distinct that it would benefit from a unique domain. For example, http://maps.google.com offers a distinctly different service than the search engine found at http://www.google.com/, but the common use of the google.com domain let's users know that both services are produced by the same entity and reinforces the Google brand. Google Analytics however uses http://www.google.com/analytics/ (a subfolder instead of a subdomain) as the analytics service is more closely tied to the search engine service.

Webmasters at Case and other universities could argue that their sites are topically distinctive—after all we house sites on topics ranging from Art History and Art to Darwin and Evolution—but collectively such subjects tie together in furtherance of our educational mission. There's no compelling reason to distinguish them through the use of subdomains.

Can't subdomains enhance search engine optimization (SEO)?

From what I've read the answer is no, although people have tried to use subdomains to cheat the system. When someone searches for a particular word or phrase most search engines will limit the number of results it shows from any given domain. Thus if you search for "Web Development Blog" on Google, you'll see that this blog shows up twice (Google's limit is normally 2 results). The main page shows up in the results as does one of the individual entry pages. The entry page is indented below to show that it is coming from the same site.

It used to be that subdomains were treated as separate sites, so marketers might distribute related content across subdomains so additional listings would show up on search engine results pages (SERPs). While this was helpful to marketers it wasn't so helpful to users, so Google has refined their algorithms, so that subdomains aren't given an automatic advantage. Relevance comes first, so this doesn't mean you will never see more than 2 subdomains appear on the same SERP. (A search for "Case Western Reserve" shows several subdomains.) It simply means that with all content being equal the subdomain won't have an advantage over a subfolder when it comes to issues of SEO.

If I can use a subdomain I'll have a shorter address than I have now.

While a subdomain may result in a slightly shorter file name, that will probably have very little impact on your marketing strategies. I'll discuss URL length and naming conventions further in an upcoming entry.

Learn more about the use of subdomains and subfolder in URLs

• How Changes To The Way Google Handles Subdomains Impact SEO
• Subdomains and subdirectories
• Subdomains, Subfolders and Top-Level Domains
• Subdomains vs. Accounts - Case's Naming Conventions

Last week, while catching up on podcasts, I listened to Can Social Networking Build Your Brand?, Jason Schwartz's presentation from SXSW Interactive 2007 (View his slideshow). Jason crammed a lot of interesting ideas into his 25 minute presentation (to which you should listen), but his references to de.licio.us, similicio.us and Technorati got me thinking about what a tremendous resource de.licio.us can be.

In addition to being a good place to share bookmarks and find sites in your areas of interest, de.licio.us can also provide some interesting information about your own site(s), specifically:

• Who has bookmarked your site?
• When did they bookmark the site?
• What tags have been used for your site?
• What other sites share those tags?
• What tags are related to those tags?

This information intrigues me because it offers new opportunities for networking and search engine optimization.

Networking through de.licio.us

Given that de.licio.us includes a networking component, it's pretty obvious that we should look at the pages of those who bookmark our sites to see what else we have in common. If one of these people has bookmarked sites related to our topic, then we may want to add that person to our network.

Additionally, their bookmarks can lead us to sites that compete with our own (that we should follow) as well as sites that complement our own. If some of these sites are blogs, we can comment on them and begin to network with their authors and readers to share knowledge and draw traffic to our own sites. We may also want to follow/friend such people on social media services such as Pownce, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and the place where we began, de.licio.us.

de.licio.us tags can inform key word choices for SEO

If we've thought carefully about our topic and pay attention to our analytics we should have a good idea regarding the key words and phrases users choose when searching for our content.

When people search for a topic, they usually search for word combinations they expect to find on the type of site they are seeking. If they're detail oriented they'll try to fine tune these in such a way that they can narrow the results to very specific types of sites.

But when people tag a site they've bookmarked, they tag it with the word combinations they associate with the content—the words they'll be most likely to remember 6 months from now when they're trying to find the site they bookmarked on polymers that can change from hard to soft. They might search for the site using "hard soft polymer change" and tag it the same way, but they may also tag it under: polymerresearch, neuroscience, seacucumber, science, chemoresponsive, mechanicadaptability, casewesternreserveuniversity, macromolecular and so forth.

Some of these tags might be obvious or redundant, but others might give us some ideas for more key words we should include on our site.

Example: Putting the Web Development Blog under the de.licio.us microscope

If we look at the de.licio.us results for the Web Development blog, we'll see that 20 people have bookmarked it. That won't give us as much data as we'd find for a higher profile site, but it will still give us some interesting information.

The first thing we'll notice is that the most popular tags are: CSS, blog, development, web, webdesign, webdevelopment. That's not a big surprise; we know those terms already occur multiple times throughout the blog.

If we look below that we'll see the posting history. This lists, in reverse chronological order, the users who have bookmarked the page, the year and month they bookmarked it and the tags they used.

User Tags

Looking at these tags I see a few that vary from the Web focus, including: highered, uni_blogs, uni_webdev, ublog and academiccomputing. This is useful because while I may think of the Web as the primary theme of this blog, others are associating it with higher education and academia. Since they are classifying it in this manner, it may mean that others might be looking for blogs on such topics. Thus it might behoove me to include phrases like "college blog," "university blog," "academic computing," and "blogging in education" somewhere relevant within the site. If I add such terms this month I can check back over the coming months to see if they start appearing in my site analytics. While my writing on the topic automatically includes them in this blog entry, I'll also consider whether some are appropriate to my About Us page.

Bookmarking dates

Having pondered my keywords, I'm now curious about the dates the site was bookmarked. The dates could be meaningless—just random times when visitors found the site—but they could also indicate that certain entries sparked enough interest (at the time they were published) that someone felt it worthwhile to bookmark them for future reference. Nothing particularly exciting stands out for November 2005, but November 2006 includes the article, A writer's obligations: ethics, law and pragmatism, Part 3: Pragmatism, which my stats have shown to be one of the more popular entries on the blog. This may just be coincidental, but if you have a larger site that has been bookmarked more often than mine you may be able to find some more obvious patterns.

Bookmarking users

Finally let's look at the people who have bookmarked the page. Some of the names are familiar, they're people I either know in person or online. But others are unfamiliar. If I know them, I don't know them by their usernames. I don't recognize sandpetra, but he/she's tagged the blog as "clink." I'm not quite sure what that means, but when I go to his/her page I see that he/she has a lot of sites tagged under accessibility, accessiblewebsitedesign, webdesign, seo and other topics that interest me. Seeing this I've added sandpetra to my de.licio.us network. A Google search on the name tells me that sandpetra is the Web Marketing Director for Hobo-Web Ltd UK an SEO and design firm near Glasgow in Scotland. Hobo-Web also produces a well-written blog called Hobo News, to which I will now subscribe. (Check out their post, Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments?) See, this connection has already proved useful—it provides content I think you would enjoy reading.

Conclusion: de.licio.us is useful in many ways.

If you're not already using de.licio.us as a bookmarking tool, I hope I've given you a few more reasons to do so. And if you're not sure what to bookmark first, feel free to start with this blog as well as this entry!

de.licio.us (and related) resources

• Common Craft’s Plain English Video Series
• similicio.us
• Social Survey: Del.icio.us
• The Del.icio.us Lesson
• Wikipedia: del.icio.us

While the medium is different, blogs have much in common with magazines. They're published periodically, can accept subscriptions (via RSS feeds), may (or may not) accept advertising and typically focus on a particular topic or niche. If you blog, you have some notion of your topical area in your head, but have you defined it for your readers? If not, it may be time to take a page from the magazines and define a clear editorial policy for your blog. Just as setting clear goals aids in the development of a regular Web page, defining a clear editorial policy for your blog will aid you in authoring future articles and attracting new readers.

What is an editorial policy?

An editorial policy is simply a short document that defines what subjects will (or will not be) covered in your blog. It may also include information on why you are covering X and not Y as well as some background information on the authors. Magazines typically publish their policies in their advertising media kits and/or their guidelines for writers. For a blog you may wish to include your policy on the "About Us" page and also provide a quick summary in the meta description element in the head of your pages. If you edit a multi-author blog, you may also find it helpful to maintain a more detailed policy for your writers that you do not publish online. This could include style guidelines and other rules that are useful to your staff but not of particular interest to the public.

Here are my top 5 reasons to define your editorial policy.

1. Establishing clear parameters for the scope of your topic helps you determine what to write and lets readers (and search engines) know what to expect.

How much or how little you write about makes a great difference. If your topic is too broad, you may confuse readers who don't know what to expect. If it is too narrow you may run out of things to say. In For ‘bloggers, diversification avoids stagnation, Wayne Smallman addresses how the breadth of your subject area can keep your blog interesting while also supporting your Internet marketing efforts.

For example, imagine you are blogging about baking. This is a huge subject. If your expertise lies more towards bread than pastries you may limit it to that. But what if you don't discuss quick breads but do cover beignets? Perhaps your focus is yeast-leavened baking and not merely bread. Somewhere between recipes for oatmeal bread and anything cooked in an oven you will find, and define, the scope of your subject.

If your scope includes puff pastries and you have a yen to write about Beef Wellington, then feel free. Both you and your readers will know that it fits within your policy and you won't have spent hours wondering whether or not it's on topic.

2. Defining your scope reduces off-topic submissions

Some blogs accept suggestions and/or articles from readers and other writers. While this can be a great way to get new ideas and material, you probably don't have the time to sort through ideas that aren't relevant to the topic. In terms of our baking blog, it may be that our policy includes some desserts but does not include pies and tarts.

If we make this clear up front we can spend more time writing articles and less time writing rejection letters. Doing so also provides a service to your submitters. If Peter Piemaker knows your policy, he'll be able to focus his time more appropriately and find a different blog—one whose editors and readers would love to know more about making a kiwi tart with tamarind crème anglaise.

3. A clear editorial focus matches advertisers with your audience

This blog doesn't accept advertising, but yours might. When magazines sell advertising they create a media kit with information about the topic of the magazine and the demographics of their readership. Advertisers use this information in order to target readers who are most likely to buy their products. If your blog accepts advertising, you also want your ads to be appropriate to your subject matter and audience. Readers of your baking blog will be more likely to click on ads related to bread pans and mixers, than on fishing lures or hair-care products, and will thus generate more revenue for you and your advertisers. Having a clearly defined editorial policy helps advertisers choose between your blog and someone else's.

4. Publishing your editorial policy supports your Search Engine Optimization strategies

As we know from An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), including topically relevant keywords within your content helps search engines to identify the topics discussed on your site. While individual entries will feature keywords appropriate to those entries, where should you put the keywords that describe the the blog as a whole? Your editorial policy is the perfect place to include these because it defines the topics included in your site overall.

By publishing your policy on an "About Us" or other page, you can draw readers searching for the overall themes of your blog in addition to those searching topics covered in more specific entries.

If you already have an "About " page this is a good time to review it to determine if your editorial policy is clearly defined and if that policy includes the appropriate keywords. As your blog evolves, it is also a good idea to review this once a year. I just re-read mine and found it unsuitably vague so I've now rewritten it to be more specific.

5. Including an editorial policy or content description promotes a professional image and can demonstrate your expertise.

One of the first things I do after discovering a new blog is to look for the "About" page. I want to know more about the blog's overall theme and its author(s). If that information isn't available I'll have to skim through the entries to see if an identifiable theme emerges and if I can learn anything about the writer's expertise. If I've found an interesting entry—and I'm thinking of subscribing to the blog—I need this information to decide if I'll be interested in future entries and if the author should be considered a reliable source. If I don't have time to do this research myself I probably won't subscribe. I'm already subscribed to more blogs than I can keep up with, so if I can't quickly determine a blog's relevance to my life, I probably won't bother.

If you want repeat readers, especially subscribers, take a few minutes to provide this information. They'll respect you for it.

Conclusion: Establishing an editorial policy helps you set the tone of your blog

Whether you want a better way to determine what to write, wish to increase readership or want to fine-tune your advertising, a clearly defined editorial policy can guide the way. Whether you call it "Editorial Policy," "About Us" or something else doesn't matter. If the policy is clear to you and your readers it will enhance the blogging experience for all involved.

Examples of Editorial and Advertising Policies in Magazines and Blogs

The following policies vary from short descriptions to more in-depth policy statements. If your blog accepts advertising you may be interested in The Nation's advertising policy which is very detailed and says, among others things, "Although the relationship of the First Amendment to commercial advertising is complex, we start with strong presumption against banning advertisers because we disapprove of, or even abhor, their political or social views. But we reserve (and exercise) the right to attack them in our editorial columns." I thought that was rather thought-provoking, though such a statement is obviously more necessary to "The Nation" than it would be to many blogs.

• About Ars Technica
• .eduGuru About Page
• The Nation's Advertising Policy
• The Nation's Editorial Profile
• The New Yorker Mission Statement
• Time Magazine
• Science Daily - About this site

This is the first in a series of posts that will discuss SEO and other Web marketing strategies. Before we dig into our first discussion of SEO, it is worth remembering that search engines are not the only way visitors get to your site. Google analytics for this blog (during the past month) showed that 49.32% of visitors came via searches, 41.24% came from referring sites, and 9.44% already knew the link and came here directly of their own accord. Optimizing your site for search engines is important, but it is only one part of your overall marketing strategy.

What is SEO?

According to Wikipedia:

"Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines."

Thus, to optimize our sites we need to know both how people use search engines, and how we can affect our site's search results. This is important because we don't seek high rankings for just any search. We seek high rankings on searches relevant to the content on our site.

Search engine usage habits

We all know, from our own experience, that we are more likely to visit the sites we find on the first page of a search result than we are on the 15th page. Sometimes we visit the first site on the list, sometimes the second, third or 10th, depending on what phrases show up with the results. Other times none of the results seems correct, so we use those results to modify the words or phrases used in our search and begin again.

While user habits may vary, all users are searching for something in particular. Some may search on one word, others a combination of words, others combinations of words and phrases, etc. More experienced users will apply boolean logic, while others may just look for simple word combinations. After typing in the terms, the searcher will review the listed sites, skim the phrases shown below the links, then visit the sites that seem most likely to provide the information they seek. If none of the sites deliver, the searcher will have to keep scrolling through the results pages or refine the search.

As my high school calculus teacher used to say, this is obviously true. I don't want to bore you with the obvious, but for today I want us all to be thinking about the basics. In theory, searchability is simple. If we want searchers to find us, all we need to do is to match our content to their search terms. Of course there is more to it than that, but if we start with a solid foundation we can implement additional strategies later.

Maximizing searchability through content and format

First and foremost, match your content to your goals and the goals of your anticipated readership. If your site is about Pygmy Hippos, then tell us about those hippos. Show us pictures, describe their habits, habitat and physiology. If you think your readers will want more information than you can provide, create a page with links to other sites that you find to be reliable. If your content is good, visitors will read your content, and possibly link to your site in the future. I'll discuss how links factor into searchability in a later post. For now, let's look at the structure of your pages. We'll work our way down from the top, by reviewing some of the coding you should include in your page

Doctype Declaration

The Doctype let's browsers know how to properly render your page. Below the doctype, in the <html> tag you should also include information such as the language the text is written in. This is important for users who are searching for sites written in a specific language. This information is followed by <head> Examples of this code can be found on the W3C's Recommended DTDs to use in your Web document page.

Document Title

The document title is what users see at the top of their browser (to show them where they are). It is also the title shown in search results. As such it should be descriptive of your site and reflect its content. Here on the Web Development Blog I use: <title>Web Development Blog: Creative Services: Marketing and Communications: Case Western Reserve University</title> for the title. It's simple and also shows this blog's connection to its parent department and the university. I use the same title on my blog pages because the pages are generated by my templates. On a regular Web site you can make the title specific to each page.

Keywords Meta Tag

The keywords tag is not a magic bullet—most search engines don't even use it. Clients will often request this, so it doesn't hurt to include it as long as you use it wisely (overuse of keywords in either a metatag or elsewhere, can penalize you). For the search engines that do index this tag, you will have better luck if you keep the list short (less than a dozen keywords/phrases) and only use keywords that are actually found in the text of your page or site. There are those who recommend using currently popular keywords to get more traffic, but this is not a good idea. Even if this worked, why would you want to? Traffic for the sake of traffic doesn't serve your end goal. If you are recruiting students to your Ph.D. program, including "Harry Potter" as a keyword isn't going to bring you students preparing for graduate school, it will only bring Harry Potter fans—only a small number of which plan on studying polymers. The few search engines that support this tag give it very little weight, so don't spend much time on this. Just pick a few words that are directly related to your content, then move on.

Meta Description Tag

This tag is important. The search engines not only index the words used in your description, they also display this text on the search results page. Users rely on this when deciding whether to visit your site or someone else's. Your description should reflect the nature of your site, and include relevant keywords or company name as appropriate. For this blog I've used: <meta name="description" content="Case's Web Development Blog offers tips, tricks and a place to exchange ideas with web maintainers on campus." /> It's short and to the point. And while I'm getting pretty good search results (see below), perhaps I could refine it. The words "tips" and "tricks" aren't used very often, except in the category listing. Now that I've had this blog for a few years it might be a good time to review my content and adjust this description accordingly.

Using Keywords in Headlines & Text

It's well known that search engines and browsers know that words in headlines such as <h1>'s are more important or descriptive than words in the main text, but there seems to be some debate regarding the effectiveness of using keywords in these areas. I would focus more on making these headings meaningful to readers. If the headlines reflect the topic of discussion many of them will naturally be keywords anyway. As with the Case Web templates, put the name of your site in the <h1> tag, a descriptive topical headline in the <h2> or <h3> and descriptive sub headings in your <h4>'s, <h5>'s and <h6>'s. Be specific rather than vague. If you are making a page about your research in elastomers, make your heading "Elastomer Research" rather than just "Research." Using specific headlines helps readers navigate your content more easily. Choosing key words for your main text should also happen naturally. Users are searching on terms they expect would be relevant to the topic. As such you'll probably be using these words as a matter of course. If you think visitors will search on term X, but you've not used it in your site, don't try to force it somewhere it doesn't fit. Instead find a logical context for it. This may entail writing another page or paragraph, but if you think this word is relevant then you should use it in a meaningful way.

In addition to the above, there are other meta-tags you can consider, but overall if you focus on your content you should be in pretty good shape. I'll continue this discussion of search engine optimization strategies in future posts.

Additional Resources on Search Engine Optimization

• Google's Blog for Webmasters
• Google Webmaster Help Center
• Search Engine Ranking Factors V2
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Watch

Web Development Blog Search Results (Google)

This little blog does pretty well in keyword searches. Part of this is due to following the steps outlined above, but mostly it is a matter of continuing to provide topical content. As with everything we discuss here, content is key.

Results by keyword searches done July 17, 2007 (these will vary over time):

• Web development blog: 1 of about 329,000,000
• Case marketing blog: 5 of about 94,000,000
• marketing web blog: 8 of about 239,000,000
• web blog: 149 of about 1,040,000,000. That puts us on the 15th page of the results, so I have some work to do, but to come out that high on such a broad topical search is still pretty good!

Comments to this post are now closed.

I've closed comments here as of January 14, 2008 because we've been getting so many similar responses from people who wish to promote links to their own sites. While I have no problem with allowing links in comments that add value to the discussion, most of the comments received in the past few weeks have been repetitive.