SEO - Optimization for Search Robots

Content of the lesson:

SEO

You can capture the first places in search results (and make your website visible in the Internet) thanks to proper optimization - you do not have to pay for marketing or internet advertisement.

We are going to focus on these two essential search engines: www.google.cz and www.seznam.cz.

The shortcut SEO comes from the phrase Search Engine Optimization (for search robots).

Note 1: there are many mistakes in this combination of words - people often write "Search Engine Optimalization" - but the proper word is "optimization".

Note 2: people often use the term SEO optimization - this is wrong, because they say Optimization of optimization (the word optimization is already part of the shortcut).

Before we continue talking about SEO, you should know that SEO is usually a long process and the results are not visible immediately, but usually after weeks of months.

Optimizing Web Presentation

What does "optimizing" a web presentation mean? It is a set of properties of web presentation, for example:

• a proper HTML code structure (headlines, paragraphs, links, title of website...),
• you should have enough text on you website (search robots need it to search in),
• it is right to use nice-looking URL addresses, as www.gjszlin.cz/gztgm/disparticle.php?id=135 vs. www.gjszlin.cz/gztgm/informace-o-skole/ (You can use rewriting in your .htaccess file. It is also not a good idea to change indexed addresses. Note: .htaccess file is invisible under Linux - you have to enable showing of hidden files.),
• one of the requests of search robots is the fact that our website is linked from another one (the more links to our website, the more relevant data it should contain). You usually link relevant websites on you pages, do you not?

SEO should have - among others - the effect that our presentation will be taken as the most relevant to a particular topic and the search engine will offer our website as the most relevant one to the searched topic (searched by a user).

What will happen when you enter the same phrase into a search engine as someone has written on his website? The search engine offers you links to websites which are considered to be the most relevant ones (the links are sorted according to the relevance - that means how the search engine considers them to be relevant).

Very often question is which search engine is the best one. In general we can say that the best search engine is the one which brings the most users to our website (see the statistics of search engines for Czech Republic at http://toplist.cz/global.html).

Indexing Pages

What does it mean that our website is indexed into a search engine database? Indexing means saving information from our website to the database of the search engine. The search engine discovers our website in the moment when a link to it is available in the internet. When a search engine gets a link it visits our website, download information about our HTML code and saves it into its database. The robot comes to our website repeatedly (many times a day or once per a week, you cannot affect this fact) and it updates the information inside the database because our website may have changed.

If you index your website the first time, it will not appear in the search results immediately but a few weeks after being indexed (usually 1-2 months).

SERP

This term is often used when talking about SEO and it means "Search Engine Results Page", one result from this page is called a snippet. One result usually has this information:

• title (identical with the text inside the title tag - you should not only consider the phrase when creating a title but also the order of words),
• preview of the website,
• part of the text (snippet) - it is a part of the text which contains the text which was searched,
• URL address (where the searched phrase was found),
• additional information.

Sitemap

Sitemap (a map of website) is called a file (usually sitemap.xml), which is inserted into the root directory of your website and it contains a list of all links at your website. The search engine then does not need to search through every page for links but it takes links from this file. This file is usually generated by an automated PHP script (for example www.michalkubicek.cz/ke-stazeni or www.slosar.sk/google-sitemaps-offline-generator or www.scriptsocket.com/sitemaps.php) or by a specialized program if you have a local copy of your website.

On-page Optimization

Optimization the source code of the page (headlines, content, navigation, ...) affects how search engines see our page. Important on-page factors:

• Text inside title tag - ideally unique for every page, 2-4 important words. If you want to have the name of your website inside the title (for example Gallery of students - Gymnázium a Jazyková škola s právem státní jazykové zkoušky Zlín) insert it in the end. Try not to exceed 60 characters, the order is very important.
• Headlines H1-H6 - the most important text of the page
• Important words are tagged using the strong tag - you should not use too many strong tags because then the search engine stops considering it as important information.
• Alternative texts to your images - blind users and robots.
• Your own text information - the absolutely essential factor which every user analyzes and uses.
• Be aware that important information (for example a logo instead of the name of a company in the headline) can be poorly recognizable for a search robot.

File robots.txt

Information and instructions for robots. Robots can read this file but you cannot order them to follow it. The simplest way is to create in your root directory an empty robots.txt file.

HTML Header and Meta Tags

Important information for search engines is located inside the head part of your page. Take a look at a concrete example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
   <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
     <head>
       <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1250" />
       <title>Hlavní stránka - Lékárna Salvia Zlín</title>
       <script type="text/javascript" src="js/prototype.js"></script>
       <script type="text/javascript" src="js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder"></script>
       <script type="text/javascript" src="js/lightbox.js"></script>
       <meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache, must-revalidate" />
       <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />
       <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="cs" />
       <meta name="author" content="Michal Mikláš" />
       <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="-1" />
       <meta name="keywords" lang="cs" content="lékárna, lékárna Salvia, lékárna Salvia Zlín,
         lékárna Zlín, Salvia" />
       <meta name="description" lang="cs" content="aktuality, novinky, promoakce, prezentace, výhodná
         cena, prodejní akce, lékárna, lékárna Salvia, lékárna Salvia Zlín, lékárna Zlín, Salvia" />
       <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
       <link href="css/salvia.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" />
       <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
       <script type="text/javascript">
         var _gaq = _gaq || [];    _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-18714647-1']);
         _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);     ...   })();
       </script>
    </head>

Individual Task

Try to explain all lines inside the head part using the Internet.

Statistics of Website

A quality hosting usually provides you the possibility to watch statistics and attendance of your website. If not provided you can use google analytics service.

For creating statistics about your website you can use these tools: Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools.

More Information about SEO

Landing Page

This is the page where user gets after clicking on a link from a search engine.

Which Pages Are Known for Search Engine?

You can use the site or host operators inside a search engine - for example try to search site:www.michalmiklas.cz using www.seznam.cz search engine.

Multiple Words Domain Names

A search engine takes the dash character as a word break (www.nerezove-hrnce.cz).

Actual Position in Search Results

• www.seo-pruvodce.cz (http://www.seo-pruvodce.cz/seo-analyza.html)
• http://www.nastroje-seo.eu/

The Number of Links to Your Website

link:www.adresawebu.domena

Links Check on Web

For example the Xenu application for PC which searches through the whole web and checks links to be valid.

A Few Facts about Search Engine at www.seznam.cz

First level domains - the last part should have 2-4 letters (for example cz, gov, com, info apod.) are being called as TLD (top level domain). TLD are divided to generic gTLD (.com, .net) and geographic ccTLD (.cz, .sk etc.). For example seznam.cz as the largest Czech search engine does not index several domains at all even if you create a valid website (you should use Czech language when creating a .cz website) but you can ask seznam to index your website.

Seznam also indexes only websites using these encodings: utf-8, iso-8859-2 or windows-1250.

It is a catalogue search engine (google is a fulltext one) - the links are sorted in a catalogue. In CZ most of users use rather Seznam than Google so the position inside this catalogue is essential in Czech Republic.

There are many online webs dealing with the SEO issues, you can see several ones in the Links part below.

Homework

Optimize your website for search engines.

Additional Texts

Questions

1. What is SEO?
2. What is indexing websites?
3. Characterize on-page optimization.
4. Characterize robots.txt file and its meaning.
5. Characterize sitemap.xml file and its meaning.
6. How can you create and watch statistics of your website?