No matter how good your site is, it is worthless if nobody finds it. And today there are more than 20 billion web pages out there, so the competition for the visitors is fierce.
One of the best ways to be found is by search engines: Google, Bing, Baidu, and all the rest. If your site gets a place among the top 10 in the Google search result, then you are definitely visible. The goal of this document is just that: to teach you how to make your site appetizing for Google.
There are techniques on how to achieve that, and we are not talking about rocket science here. Many of them can be easily implemented by a site owner without more than a basic understanding of HTML and a bit of common sense. If you feel that you lack that basic understanding of HTML, please have a look at our HTML tutorial.
And since we are nice guys here, we will teach you techniques that are useful not only with WDP sites, but with any site you like. For technical reasons, not all of the advice given below can be implemented by yourself on your WDP site, but on the other hand, the WDP staff can do all this, so you are not missing any opportunities here.
What the other guy wants
First, look upon it from Google's point of view. In an ideal world, the result of a Google search will get 100% relevant hits, making the users happy with the Google search engine and thus making the advertisers happy with placing ads on www.google.com. This means that all of the search algorithms aim at measuring the relevance of a page.
Imagine that you make a search for "Elvis Presley". When I did this, the top result was www.elvis.com, showing the text: Elvis Presley - Official web site for Elvis Presley Welcome to the Official Elvis Presley Web Site, home of the undisputed King of Rock 'n' Roll and his beloved Graceland Mansion in Memphis, Tennessee.
Totally relevant. Now if I had paged myself down to result 200,000, I would probably have found some blogger describing himself with the words ". and loves Elvis Presley." He also wrote about Elvis, but he did not get the first place in the search result. Obviously it is not only about what you write, but also about how you write it. There are other factors too; more about them later.
White Hat
There are more ways than one to kill a cat. We have all made a search for something innocent, like "sports car" or "Britney Spears", clicked on a link, and found ourselves on a porn site. Because you can fool Google for a while. In a very short time, this porn site will no longer be found on Google, which is bad news for the site owner. The Google technicians frown upon tricks like this (for example, having a web page with innocent text but as soon as you visit it you get automatically redirected to a porn page). With a nod to the old Western movies, they are called "Black Hat techniques", since the bad guys always wore black hats. We are going to use White Hat techniques; it pays off in the not-so-long run. Most of these can actually be read from Google's own tutorials.
By the way, it is easy to recognize a Black Hat technique. If it feels like cheating, then it is Black Hat. Promote your site the way you, as a web user, would like to see sites promoted.
The gist of the matter
The search engine algorithms make a few very reasonable assumptions:
1) The words in the captions, and other kinds of special text, are probably more important/relevant than the words in the main body of text.
2) If you repeat something, it is probably more important/relevant than the text you do not repeat.
So let us have a look at the places that Google consider "Special texts". That means a quick look at the HTML of the page: what you see if you select "View Source" in your browser.
The visible part of a page is the one written between <BODY> and </BODY> (Note: with very few exceptions, HTML tags come in pairs like these. So for the rest of this document, we will assume that they do and not write between <xxx> and </xxx> every time). There is an invisible part too, the one written in the <HEAD> tag. The <HEAD> contains code that is useful for the page, but will not be seen in the web browser, like for example scripts. It will, however, be visible to the Google search engine, and this is important.
The parts of the <HEAD> that concerns us are:
And the parts of the <BODY> that concerns us are:
So for the simple rules:
1) Make sure you have a useful Title. Nobody is going to search on Google for "Welcome to my site". The Title is possibly the most crucial part of the page, make it short and to the point, no more than 50-75 characters. Write the same text both in <TITLE> and in the content part of <META name="title">. Try to re-use one or two words from the Description (see below).
2) Write up to 20 keywords in the content part of <META name="keywords">. A typical one could be "dating", for example. Be advised that the keywords are not very important for your search ranking; possibly the best use for this tag is to hold a group of misspellings. Suppose someone searches for "daating" by accident, you could catch that user by having "daating" among your keywords. Avoid using the same keyword more than once or twice ("Free dating, sexy dating, ..." can be considered spamming of the word "dating").
3) Give careful thought to the <META name="description"> tag. Write a normal sentence or two, nothing that would give your old English teacher headache. And try to use some words that are also in the actual body text.
4) Try to include <H1> and/or <H2> tags in your Body, and make sure that the words in those tags are relevant. "Welcome" is not a good header, "Welcome to the Dating Site" is better.
5) If you have any <IMG> tags (images/photos) on your site, then do not just write <IMG src="xxxx"> but add the optional attribute ALT, like this: <IMG src="xxx" alt="single woman">. The ALT attribute is used to describe the image for the search engines (they cannot actually view the image itself) so you have a good opportunity to give it a relevant and selling description. For similar reasons, do not name an image "picture01.jpg" when you can instead call it "single_sexy.jpg".
A fairly new factor to consider is the speed of the page, i.e. when you click on a link to it, then how long time does it take to load. Here, of course, there is not much you can do - it is mainly up to the WDP staff to keep the servers and networks well oiled, but it does help if you take the time to trim some of those pictures! It is amazing how little quality is lost when you reduce, say, a JPG image from 200Kb to 50Kb. Photoshop away, please.
Finally, we have the actual body text, i.e. the text content of the page. The rule here is simple. Write the kind of text that you as a visitor would like to read, and keep it relevant. If you do it right, it will almost by itself become nicely peppered with good searchable words. Do not overdo it; do not repeat the site name in every sentence, for example. Write for your visitors, not for the search engine.
With a little help from your friends
Your site is valued not only by its contents, but also by its reputation. By that we mean, by the number of links pointing to your site, from relevant places. If, for example, another dating site writes a link to your site, then your site will get better ratings with Google. If the site with the link is big, old, and relevant, then your ratings will get a lot better. It's as simple as that.
There are lots of companies offering you to have a link to your site with them. Usually this is not worth the trouble (or cost), because Google cares about the relevancy. If a site is just functioning as a huge collection of random links, then how relevant is it to dating?
And remember - we are your friends too. We at the WDP team do our share of promoting your site with SEO techniques. We never forget that what is good for you, is also good for us.
Urban myths
There are a few misunderstandings floating around, so we better address them.
- Google does not read the actual web page, but only the HTML document that the page is based on. This means that the positions of different elements are not important; a text does not get more important if it appears in the left column, for example.
- Anything that you want Google to consider should be written as some kind of text. Not as a nice picture, because Google cannot "read" photos. Not as a Flash movie, because Google has some problems with these too.
- Your actions will have effect, but not an immediate one. Google has technology to scan the whole web for changes, but they know that some places change more often than others. They scan New York Times several times an hour, but a normal web hotel might have to wait weeks or even months.
- Nobody except Google themselves can ever guarantee you a high ranking. And Google never makes such a guarantee.
Conclusion
See Rocket science it ain't. Of course there is more to SEO than this; if you want to become really good then you need to delve deeper in the subject. But if you apply what you have learned in this document to your site, you will be far ahead of most of the competition.