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How to make sure your site is found on the search engines, simple steps to optimising your site…

It is vitally important to ensure the pages on your site are optimised for the search engines, otherwise your customers will not be able to find you. In this article I aim to unlock the secrets of search engine optimisation by explaining how the search engines catalogue sites and what their future policy is likely be. I will explain how you can use this information to build a site which will be readily understood by the search engines and therefore easily visible to the visitors you want to attract.

Why optimise…

Search engine optimisation is a vital part of your online marketing strategy. Any time and effort you put into building a website is going to be wasted if your customers cannot find it. In order to get a good rate of traffic from people who are actually looking for the product or service you provide you will need to perform some optimisation. On the upside, a little careful thought and effort on your part can bring you substantially improved results and you have nothing to lose but time.

Where to start

At present even the smartest combination of maths and programming lacks the commonsense and intuitive abilities of a human. That means that to ensure the search engines catalogue the pages of your website accurately, that is, where your customers are most likely to find them, you need to understand how the cataloguing process works. You also need to know how you can build your site and write the content in a way which is easy for the search engines to understand.

How the search engines work

Anyone who uses the web knows the frustration of typing a phrase into a search engine only to find the results return pages about a similar – but unrelated – item. The companies running the search engines, themselves, are also aware of this and in order to make their results more accurate, they are turning to increasingly sophisticated cataloguing techniques. Gone are the days when getting to the number one spot was a simple case of repeating a number of key words and phrases on your pages more than any of your competitors – in fact, these days, the search engines regard that as spamming.

Since 70% of internet searches are performed on Google – and it supplies additional results to many others – it makes sense to analyse the methods Google appears to be adopting in order to understand the methodology of the search engines generally. This extends not only to the way it operates today but also how its administrators may intend it to work in the future.

Google recommends that web pages should be written to be easily read by humans, as opposed to search engines. The general consensus among optimisation experts is that Google is moving towards using a variant of a cataloguing algorithm first invented in the 1930s called Term Vector Analysis. This uses a mathematical approach to determine the weighting of specific phrases in the document. Coupled with another method, local context analysis, it makes for more accurate cataloguing of internet pages because the true semantic meaning of the page text is captured. This makes for a system which is far less open to abuse than simply weighing up the density of relevant key words in the text.

There are five steps to the cataloguing process, here they are:-

The average webpage contains more than the text you see. There is also code embedded in the content which tells the browser your visitors are using how to display the page. The first thing a search engine does, when it reads a page on your site, is remove this code, a process which is called linearization.

How linearization affects you: The more code you have on each web page, the more difficult it is for the search engine to perform linearization with any meaningful result. For example, if your page displays tables which are defined in html, that is, with the definition embedded in the page content, the search engine will remove the code defining the table. It will then read just the text. Some search engines may read the text column by column others may read row by row. In other words, the search engine may not read the text in your table the way you intended. The best way to get around this is to use cascading style sheets. These allow you to put much of the formatting information in a separate document leaving just a handful of codes in your content. This, in turn, makes the meaning of each page clearer to the search engines’ cataloguing software.

• Removal of stop words:

Once the search engine has performed linearization the next step is to remove stop words from the text. These are words which appear often, subjunctions, pronouns… words like “if”, “but”, “and” or “to”.

How the removal of stop words affects you: If you are using keyword density techniques to optimise your site, that is, if you have typed in your key phrase again and again, there is a very real danger that the search engine will see it as a stop word, too, and remove it. This would mean that when your target audience searched for those phrases or words on the web, your site would be invisible to them.

• Local context analysis and the Lexicographical Tree:

Next the search engine aims to establish the concepts behind the page. The first way in which it does this is by using local context analysis and building a lexicographical tree. In English; it looks at sentence structure, removing collections of nouns and verbs. This is why Google advises the use of good grammar and encourages the use of readable text, because the search engine picks out subjects, objects and verbs from each sentence.

[Here is a quick grammatical summary for those of you who forgot these definitions, the way I did, the minute you left school… A sentence comprises a subject (the main protagonist of the action) a verb, (usually what the protagonist is doing) and an object (what the protagonist is doing it with or who to). Here is an example, in the sentence “Dr Who unlocked the Tardis.” The subject is “Dr Who”, the verb is “unlocked” and the object is “the Tardis”. In more complicated sentences you may find extra objects for example, “Dr Who unlocked the Tardis for Rose” can be split up in the same way but Rose is an object, too. Back to building the lexicographical tree…]

It is difficult to explain how a lexicographical tree is compiled so let’s take a hypothetical example. Imagine the search engine is looking at a page about Doctor Who. Having found the words “Doctor” or “Dr” and “Who” close to one another it will look for other words near to these three to narrow down which doctor, exactly, the site is referring to. It might find the words “Tardis”, “regeneration”, “time” and “lord”. It will then repeat the process with these four words.

Going down to the next level, it might discover the word “Tardis” is often grouped with “Galifrey”, “relative”, “dimension”, “space”, “ship”, “travel”, “machine” perhaps even “police”, “call” or “box” as well as “Doctor” or “Dr” and “time”. It would then look at those 10 words to ascertain which specific words - if any - occurred more frequently around them and so on. Once completed, this process enables the search engine to narrow down the instances when this page should be returned. If somebody types “Dr Spock” into the search box only the “Dr” part will be seen as relevant and the page will be returned much lower down in the results than it would in a search for “Dr Who” - or possibly not at all.

How building the lexicographical tree affects you: If the sentences in your text are not properly constructed the search engine may not pick up on the interrelationship of the nouns and verbs in your text and this may cause it to catalogue your site incorrectly.

• Latent Semantic Indexing:

Having established the local context of the nouns and verbs in the document the search engine looks for synonyms; different descriptions of the same thing in the text. The more alternative words and phrases it finds with the same meaning the more tightly it can define what the page is about. It uses a mathematical process on the results, called Term Vector Analysis, to further narrow down what the subject matter might be. This search for – and analysis of – synonyms is called Latent Semantic Indexing.

How Latent Semantic Indexing affects you: The more varied your descriptions, the more accurately the search engine can pin down what your site is about and the more hits you will receive from the visitors you aim to attract.

However, while varying your vocabulary is good, beware of using words in an unusual context, even if it is grammatically correct to do so, as it may skew your results. It is often useful to relate an object being written about to senses or visual images – especially in direct copy writing – but pick your words carefully. For example, a page describing a children’s ABC poster recently stated that ordering through the company’s online shop was “a piece of cake”. Shortly afterwards the site statistics started showing visitors who had been searching for information about cake decorating. An alternative way of putting it, without losing the informal tone or diluting the relevancy of the page, might have been “ordering is as easy as ABC”.

• Term Vector Analysis

Having carried out Local Context Analysis and Latent Semantic Indexing, the search engine uses a mathematical algorithm on the results, called Term Vector Analysis, to give page a score for relevance to its subject. When you use a search engine, the results are returned in order of relevance, the highest scoring sites appearing first.

How Term Vector Analysis affects you: The more relevant the data, the more useful the search engine will deem it to be and the most useful data will be returned first in any search. In other words, the more focussed your pages are and the clearer their subject matter, the higher up the list of results they will appear.

So, for example, if our hypothetical Dr Who page scores 95 out of 100 it will be one of the first results returned when somebody types “Dr Who” into the search box on Google.

What you can do to give your pages a powerful advantage

Now you know how the search engines work. Here are seven steps you can take to make sure your pages are search engine-friendly.

1. Keep your pages as uncluttered as possible: Use cascading style sheets where you can as these keep much of the formatting for your page separate from the content. The result will be text that is easier for the search engines to read. Where you need to include formatting, for example, on page titles or text headings, decide on three or four different types, sizes or colours which you are going to use and stick to them. This keeps things straightforward for your human readers as well as limiting the amount of code the search engine will have to wade through.
2. Use meta tags: These are invisible text headers at the beginning of each page which give the search engines more information about your site. You can use these to explain many things including what the page is about or whereabouts in the world you are based – handy if you wish to address an audience which resides mainly in your own country.
3. Aim to comply with formatting standards: Make sure any formatting you have done on your pages is properly parsed. As the internet moves towards set standards the search engines will, inevitably, be programmed to read pages which comply more readily. Try to make sure your site complies with WC3 readability standards – you can check each of your pages for errors using the WC3 mark up validation service at this address: http://validator.w3.org/. The content management systems we offer should automatically insert WC3 compliant formatting if you use them with the wysiwyg editors switched on.
4. Research your keywords: Take time to determine which words and phrases the visitors you wish to attract will type into the search engines – they may not be the ones which spring to your mind. If possible, ask others what they would use and if you can, add to your perspective using keyword research tools, like Wordtracker or - if you specifically need to search for a UK database of keywords - Trellian.
5. Use correct grammar: Construct your sentences properly. The search engines follow the rules of good grammar to carry out Local Context Analysis, if you want them to understand your pages, you need to use good grammar, too.
6. Use synonyms and metaphors: If you use the same key words repeatedly the search engines may categorise them as stop words and ignore them. Using alternatives reinforces what your pages are about, meaning they can be catalogued more accurately. That said, be careful using colloquialisms, slang or less well known alternative meanings or contexts for common words.
7. Keep your text tight: Make sure you have clearly defined subject matter for each page and stick to it. The more closely you stick to your chosen topic the easier it is for the search engines to catalogue.

In summary, for your customers to find you, you need to keep in mind how the search engines work, not only when you conceive the design and page structure of your site but also when you write the content. If you don’t do this all the time and effort you expend on making a website may well be for nothing.

However, the good news is that it doesn’t cost anything to optimise your pages yourself and even trying these simple steps, you can achieve a marked increase in your site's visibility on the search engines.

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