Now that you know what not to do to improve search engine rankings, I now present some good, effective SEO techniques. To apply useful and ethical search engine optimization to your site, you can make several free and feebased enhancements to your pages that can improve how the content inside them gets indexed by the Web robots and spiders that crawl the Web in search of new pages to add to their databases.

Robots and spiders, by the way, are the automated software programs that perform particular tasks, “crawl the Web” on a mission to find new Web pages, and then index the new pages in a large database. At minimum, when a new Web address is found, that page (usually the home page called index.html) is automatically added to that robot or spider’s indexing database. Furthermore, any hypertext links detected on that page may also be indexed automatically as part of the process.

Because you have very little control over whether this indexing actually happens, you can at least prepare for the possibility of it by paying special attention to all the textual content and hyperlinks on your site, especially the home page.

To get you on the right track, the following sections describe some simple ways to improve the ranking of your Web pages in search results listings for search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and others all without spending any money.

Maximizing keywords

The first thing you can do to improve a Web site’s search engine friendliness is to maximize your keywords. One of the things that search engine robots and spiders do is search for meaningful content within the text on pages that they crawl. This means that the sites you design need to help those bots find that content by including site-specific keywords that identify a company’s products and services, especially on the home page.

Keywords can be any words or short phrases that describe the product, service, or information on the site that needs to be advertised. For instance, if your site sells hand-painted customized baby onesies and other baby items, tell the world about your products using clearly identifiable keywords that visitors might use. This can help visitors around the world using search engines to more readily find a particular Web site.

Keep in mind that the keywords within the text of the site’s pages can be the same as any keywords listed in the keywords meta tag. However, because content keywords and key phrases can be integrated into the text in the body of the page, you have much more latitude for including the most popular keywords within the text that the site’s target audiences are likely to use when doing a search engine search.

To evaluate your site’s content and find ways to maximize keywords, look through each page on your site with the following key concepts in mind:

1. Verify that the text on each page especially the home page includes descriptive keywords and key phrases. For instance, if the Web site offers printing services and uses only chlorine- free 100% post-consumer recycled paper and vegetable-based inks, Chlorine-Free 100% post-consumer recycled paper and vegetable-based inks would be great key phrases to include in the page’s text, as illustrated in Figure 3-2.

2. Find ways on every page to hyperlink any keywords or key phrases to other relevant pages on the site. If you see keywords that aren’t yet linked to somewhere else on the site, add them.

For instance, if the copy on a page includes the phrase, “Our services include graphic design, offset and digital printing, mailing and fulfillment,” you can easily turn the words graphic design, offset, digital printing, mailing, and fulfillment into hyperlinks that link directly to those pages on the site.

3. To emphasize certain words or phrases within the page content, mark up headlines and bylines using headings tags like <h1> and <h2> and mark up other important text with <strong> (bold) and <em> (italic) styles.

By using these heading and emphasis tags, you’re alerting search engine robots that the content contained inside those tags is likely to be more relevant to search engine users than other content on the page. If you’re advising Web clients about improving the content on their pages, tell them not to worry about being too conservative with the amount of content placed on every page.

Many site owners erroneously think that having too much copy will scare away readers. On the contrary, some SEO guidelines recommend having a minimum of 200 words of copy on every page so that the spiders and robots have something to read and index.