In today's online world, we would be remiss not to provide at least some information on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While there are many aspects to working with search engines, and far more than we can cover in this book, we can at least let you know the term/phrase SEO often is labeled to cover several core areas. These are:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): refers to optimizing a site for search engines and is reflective of the fact that a large amount of traffic either does or can originate from a search engine. Usually this refers to solid page meta data, descriptions, and structure, as well as linking, alt text for images, sitemaps, and keyword density among the most commonly implemented strategies.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages. In short, when a site does not naturally (called "organic") show up near the top of search result pages, the alternative is to buy your way in through paid placement.
Search Engine Friendly (SEF): refers to efforts placed around helping a site be more friendly for search engines, such as using readable URLs (e.g., http://www.example.com/sports/baseball.html versus http://www.example.com/page.php?899078uy8&id=90787), ensuring redirects for moved pages are correct (e.g., 301 versus 302), etc.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.
Figure 44 gives you a high-level idea of how to think of SEO in terms of the steps from a search engines perspective, and then the various tracks that can influence it from a company/product perspective.
What this image does is that it shows the five basic steps a search engine goes through, and then shows where the various parts of a company can impact/get involved in helping rankings. The reason this view/perspective on SEO is important is because it is often wrongly thought that SEO is purely a technology effort. Let's take a look at these steps:
Discover: before a search engine can do anything, it must know you exist! The easiest way to do that is to register your site with them. You can easily find registration pages by doing a web search.
Interrogate: once a search engine knows you exist, it needs to send its spider out to index the site. In doing so, any help you can give it, such as sitemaps and easy-to-follow links, will help. Basically, you want it to find all your pages.
Classify: with your site indexed, the search engine must do its thing to classify your site. Are you a sports site? Or maybe more specifically, an NFL site? Things such as meta tags and proper descriptions in the HTML header as well as proper use of HTML headings (h1, h2, etc.) and keyword density will help ensure your site is appropriately classified.
Rank: how important is your site versus others on the Web? Each search engine has their own method, but suffice it to say, that the more people link to you and the more clicks you get on search result pages (SERPs) the higher you rank. You have some control over this by including links on your own site as well.
Display: with all the information about your site in the hands of the search engine, now it's time to properly display it when a person searches on something that matches what your site offers.
Again, there are many finer facets to SEO than we have provided here, but hopefully this will at least get you started thinking in the right direction. More specifically, you will want to have SEO in the back of your mind as you think of the following topics that we covered earlier in the book:
Links: be sure to use links within your pages—linking internal pages to other internal pages where it makes sense.
SEO/SEF Module: go ahead and plan on installing one, such as sh404SEF, for use from everything from SEF URLs to better control over page titles, meta data, and descriptions. And of course, select the proper configuration options to accommodate your needs in the Joomla configuration.
Sitemaps: install a Module that will generate a sitemap, which can be registered at popular search engines, such as Google. This helps search engines properly index your site and weight/rank the pages correctly.
Image ALT Text: either install a module that does this for you automatically or put a policy in place that requires your Authors, Editors, and Publishers to ensure all images have a solid and accurate description in the alt attribute of the
<img>element.Templates: make absolutely sure the templates you use, whether you created them yourself, found them for free, or purchased them are structured in a way that reflects good SEO practices, including proper use of heading elements, such as
<h1>,<h2>, etc.
With even a little effort, you can start to see positive lift in your search rankings, so do not undervalue the task of including it as part of your deployment. And remember...SEO is an ongoing thing. It is not something you can just do once. You need to put some solid modules/practices in place and continue to monitor and evolve them as time goes on.