First, let's talk tech. There are going to be a number of
technologies that could be used to drive your website. If you have a database
and content management system you might be using products such as .net, .asp,
.cfm, or .jsp. The technology itself does itself affect SEO, but rather the
page code developed with the technology that generates SEO'd content is the
key. No technology is better at
generating the proper code, it is the hand of the programmer of the code and
the tools that have been created to create the pages. This may be some type of admin panel that
lets you input your textual content,
mark up the text to include header or other specialty tags and then
render the page.
The output of your
web pages themselves are formatted using HTML and CSS. These could be defined as page layout tools
and style sheets. It is with these
specific functions that you perform what could be lightly termed the special
sauce; added to your content, this does the final optimization of your web
page. Think of it as mama's special
spices for her world class spaghetti.
Without rehashing too much regarding the actual text or
content of the page which I discussed in a previous blog article, part 3 of
this series, it is the application of html and css tags to that content that
delivers that final SEO spice. This is
the use of specific markup tags that create headers, sub headers, bold text, lists and much
more. All of these let you emphasize
specific text such as with the header H1..H5 tags, it also creates logical
sections and breaks up the text to make it more readable for your viewers. So this performs multiple functions and that
is SEO for the search engine spiders and SEO for the viewer. If your audience
is engaged, reading, then they are more apt to follow your call to action. Bolding words also lends more emphasis within
paragraphs and large quantities of text. And hyperlinks, that are links to
other pages within the content of your
site leading the user to more valuable information. Again all of these help SEO
for the visitor whether it is a person or search engine spider.
As for CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, they allow you to
manipulate components and the presentational characteristics of the html. This includes the font size, face, weight
among some of its variables. One of the
most overlooked features that css allows the developer to order the data in
what is termed the final source code of the page. The most important data of a page should be
found near the top of the page just like the most important pages of a website
are typically found near to or directly linked from the home page. CSS allows the programmer to make sure the
generated code of the page contains the most important text of the page near to
the top of each page. This is an oft overlooked capability afforded
the programmer.
Finally, there are the meta tags. The primary tags are the
title, technically not a meta tag, and the page description. Each page needs a title, this is a keyword
rich narrative regarding the content of the page. Very importantly, each page
needs a unique title. Each page should
also have a meta page description. This is usually a more robust keyword rich
narrative regarding the contents of the page.
Typically, the title and description tags are utilized by the search
engines to show narrative in their search results. So placing your keywords at or near the
beginning of each of these tags is optimal.
In concluding this series of blog posts on SEO for the CEO,
to truly optimize your website you must consider all five components: design,
layout, content, page names and coding.
So to SEO your website, you have to have all of these completed
properly. So is your site truly
optimized or is there some work that needs to get done?
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