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.