I attended an evening class for search engine optimization strategies offered by Boulder Digital Arts and have a list of resources, tips, and tricks that may be of interest.

Keyword Research

Everyone describes things differently but you don’t want to guess what your customers are searching for. To start, ask a few people how they would search for something on your website. Type those search phrases into the Google Adwords tool and the SEO Tools keyword look-up and look for a synonym that has great search volume but little competition. Use this word as the targeted keyword for your new webpage, but be sure not to target more than 1-2 keywords on a single page. If there are multiple keywords of interest, make more pages. You can also use Search Engine Genie’s and SEO Tools’ competition finders to estimate the competition for a keyword by seeing which ones have the most traffic and how frequently the keywords are placed in link text and/or title text.

Keyword Targeting

Ideally, you would plan your website structure and pages around your keyword research. Once you’ve found the keyword you want to target, create a page with worthwhile information about your keyword and place the keyword:

• Once in the title tag, close to the beginning
• Once in an H1 header tag
• At least three times in the body text
• At least once in bold <strong> tag text
• At least once in an image tag alt attribute
• Once in the URL
• Once or twice in the META description

Avoid keyword stuffing. Just use natural language in your webpage content.

The Importance of In-Links

One way that a search engine learns about your webpage is through in-links. In-links from external websites are considered a vote of approval by search engines. Search engines seem more interested in natural links, such as blog postings, rather than simple link swapping. A link to just your homepage is a shallow link, and may be interpreted by a search engine as your webpage having a dearth of worthwhile content. Try to get more links to your deeper content. Moreover, get in-links from high-profile, trusted websites;a link from FDA.gov will be seen as more valuable than a link from someone’s low-traffic, personal homepage. Almost all in-links help but a link from a popular and trusted website carries more weight.

The content of the external page to your webpage also bears some relevance. If the FDA has a webpage on food allergens containing a link to your webpage about food allergens and the link text includes the words food allergens, then the search engine will see your page as being very relevant to food allergens. On the same vein, you can be penalized for linking to ‘bad’ websites. Since it is sometimes necessary to link to a ‘bad’ website, you can use the rel=”nofollow” attribute to denote that you cannot vouch for the quality of the content from that link. Avoid link exchange programs and buying directory links as they are no longer effective. However, DMOZ, Best of the Web, and niche, quality linking websites are still considered useful.

Getting In-Links

To get in-links, you need to have interesting, worthwhile content that is compelling to your customers as well as to the ‘linkerati’ - the busy bees of the internet world who pollinate sites such as digg, reddit and stumbledupon with notable links. The key here is that your content must be link-worthy, not just interesting. If you can engage the linkers, who can distribute it to your customers, and if your content is worthy of repeatable visits, then your customers will come back. Brochure webpages are useless. You need valuable information, and your webpage must actually be a resource.

To get raw in-links you can try personally asking for them. If you have a blogger friend, ask him or her to link to your webpage. You can also look at the top 100 webpages on Google for the keyword you’re aiming for and try to get links from the websites that are linking to them. You can use Yahoo Site Explorer to see what sites are linking to them.

Help your rankings and click-through

Once the search engine knows about your webpage you need be sure that it can actually read it. Use SEO Browser to view how your webpage looks to a search engine. Notice that if you use a lot of Flash or images, that the content in those elements are not readable. This results in the search engine thinking that there is no content on your page. If you use images, be sure that the important information is provided in the image tag’s alt attribute. If you must use flash, code your page using XHTML and CSS and embed small bits of flash. Also, as mentioned in Kim’s posts below, there are certain search engine ranking factors to consider that may influence your webpage’s rank in Google. In addition to keyword placement, make sure that you have a clear, distinctive HTML title and META description tag for every page on your website. Do not use the same title and description for every page because this will not tell users what content is on the page and may negatively affect the chances that user will choose your site over another. Do not duplicate body content either. If the content on your webpage is very similar to another webpage in the search engine index, then one of the webpages will be put in the supplemental index.

Carol MM wrote in the last paragraph in her post about Krishna Bharat - “He reiterated that new, frequently updated, and well-written content with lots of links to other perspectives would be found and ranked highly by Google News, but he did not offer specific methods.” I thought it was curious that he says lots of links to other perspectives - what about inlinks - people linking to you because of your excellent content?

I’m a curious sort of person and I do want to know who is inlinking to the NSDL Middle School Portal. I always look at the referral logs in my web analytics reports but lately, I have been spending some time using a tool from Yahoo - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. If you put in a URL in the Explore URL box; hit enter. On the next page, click on the hot link that says Inlinks and then Show Inlinks - Except from this domain. I’m not quite sure how they order the return list.

This tool supplies a different view than the referrals report - that report tells you if somebody actually clicked on the link and came to your site - siteexplorer tells you the sites that actually link to your site whether people have clicked on them or not.

I haven’t gone through all 1,240 inlinks but I have found some interesting uses for the MSP content.

Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist at Google and creator of Google News

There are currently 41 editions of Google News in 18 languages. Founder Krishna Bharat began this shuttle service to news and networked information on the Web based on the idea that since Google had millions of global users anyway, why not create a newspaper that would learn about what people are reading in every language, every country, every newspaper, and every story? Google News does not own or create anything, they merely aim to make what others write discoverable.

Bharat spoke at a Symposium on Computation and Journalism at Georgia Tech on Feb. 22, 2008. “We believe in fair and unbiased ranking,” he said. Google news crawlers gather stories in “clusters” based on title, snippet from description, source, timestamp, URL, and links to “other perspectives.” This YouTube video, In Conversation: Google’s principal scientist-Krishna Bharat, explains his thinking behind developing Google News algorithms.

When a big story breaks Google News gathers and tracks a story’s evolution by weighing aggregated editorial interest by some fairly subjective metrics: originality, freshness, the quality or expertise of the source, and the localness of the source.

The audience was comprised of many of the journalists who wrote the stories that Google News gathers up in an untouched-by-human-hands, automated fashion. They wanted to talk about whether gathering news by computation was really unbiased, and further, was it fair to use other people’s work to build a Google News empire.

I was there to talk about the ideas, technology and workflow behind Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears. Since most NSDL content creators are interested in having their content become more discoverable in searches at Google, I asked Bharat what technologies or methods he would suggest to make that happen.

He reiterated that new, frequently updated, and well-written content with lots of links to other perspectives would be found and ranked highly by Google News, but he did not offer specific methods. These suggestions are not new, but worth keeping in mind as we seek to maximize the semantic effects of interconnected search optimizations strategies.

In honor of Kim Lightle’s great presentation on her search engine optimization efforts on our last Pathways project teleconference, we’ve added a section listing some of the better SEO resources to the NSDL Technology Standing Committee home page.  If you know of other interesting SEO resources that might be good candidates for the list, please drop me a note and we’ll get them up there.

 For anyone who is already familiar with SEO, the “Gadgets, Google, and SEO” blog is particularly interesting, as it’s written by the head of the team at Google that’s charged with preventing site operators from gaming Google to gain artificially higher search result rankings.

We are adding a meta description tag to the HTML header of each page of the NSDL Middle School Portal not because the addition increases the ranking of our content but because several search engines use this tag to display the snippet of text below the clickable title link in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Searchers generally make their decision as to which result to click by reading this description, so, while the meta description tag may have little to no impact on where a page ranks, it can significantly impact the number of visitors the page receives from search engine traffic.

I have read that meta description is not always used on the SERPs, but can be seen (at the discretion of the search engine) if the description is accurate, well-written, and relevant to the searcher’s query. However, in the case of the MSP content, the meta descriptions are being displayed as part of the SERPs at least by Google and Yahoo.

If you do a Google or Yahoo search on “germ theory middle school,” you’ll see the meta description show up in the search results page for both the Introduction and the Background Knowledge pages of the NSDL Middle School Portal Germ Theory publication. The description makes sense. If you look at the other entries (including the one from the NSDL collection), it is much harder to figure out what Google or Yahoo might be returning without opening up the link.

The following is a generic example for a meta description following Google specifications:

meta name=”description” content=”There is a 250 character limit; it should sum up what the page is all about. This is what is displayed on the search engine return page so you want it to be compelling to users so they will click on your link not somebody else’s link; can be phrases.”

Here are some real examples from one of the NSDL Middle School Portal publications. We write a unique meta description for each page of the site that directly relates to the content on that page.

Turning Points in Science: Germ Theory: Introduction

meta name=”description” content=”This free, standards-based, online publication, developed for middle school science teachers, explores the history and nature of science through the topic of germ theory by linking to and describing inquiry-based lessons and activities.”

Turning Points in Science: Germ Theory: Background Information for Teachers

meta name=”description” content=”Resources focus on science content knowledge and historical background. This free, standards-based, online publication, developed for middle school science teachers, explores the topic of germ theory.”

Turning Points in Science: Germ Theory: Lessons on the Historical Context

meta name=”description” content=”Inquiry-based lessons on the life, times, and cultural contexts of the 19th and 20th centuries. This free, standards-based, online publication, developed for middle school science teachers, explores the topic of germ theory.”

This document – Search Engine Ranking Factors V2 - represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google’s ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). It also has a list of the Top 10 Positive Factors, Most Controversial Factors, and Top 5 Negative Factors.

The highest ranked factor was placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header. At the NSDL Middle School Portal we have been updating all of the content on our website with title tags that include important keywords. The Google indexer looks at the first 66 characters including spaces of the title tag so we have limited ourselves to 66 characters.

An example of how we have updated title tags can be seen in the Explore in Depth publication Geologic Time: Eons, Eras, and Epochs. Each Explore in Depth publication has sections called Introduction, Background Information for Teachers, Lessons and Activities, and National Science Education Standards. We used to use these very generic section titles for the actual title tag on each page. Now each page gets a title tag that includes important key words that are part of the content of the page. For instance, the Introduction page has the title tag - Geologic Time for Middle School Science Teachers. The Background Information for Teachers page has the title tag - Geologic Time Content Knowledge for Middle School Science Teachers. The Lessons and Activities page has the title tag - Geologic Time Activities for Middle School Science Teachers. The National Science Education Standards page has the title tag - Geologic Time for Middle School Science Teachers: National Standards.

One of the keys is determining what search terms or phrases searchers are using and making sure those terms are ones that are included in these title tags. This also means that we need to know what the needs of our users are so that we are producing content that meets those needs.

I am trying to practice what I preach in terms of the title that I gave this blog post - 63 characters and terms that appear in the blog post.

This blog is being created to discuss search engine optimization ideas, but can and hopefully will evolve into any technical topic or discussion thats hot at the moment. Have at it …..