Understanding How Search Engines See Your Content

Search engines don't care what your site looks like because they can't see what your site looks like; their crawlers care only about the content. The crawls care about the material in your blog, the way it's titled, the words you use, and the way you structure them.

You need to keep this focus in mind when you create the content of your blog. Your URL structure and the keywords, post titles, and images you use in posts all have an impact on how your blog ranks. Having a basic understanding about how search engines view your content can help you write content more attractive to search engines. Here are a few key areas to think about when you craft your content:

• Keywords in content: Search engines take an intense look at the keywords or combination of keywords you use. Keywords are often compared to the words found within links guiding people back to the post and in the title of the post itself to see if they match. The better these keywords align, the better ranking you get from the search engine.
• Post title: Search engines analyze the title of your blog post for keyword content. If you're targeting a specific keyword in your post and that keyword is mentioned throughout the post, mention it in the post title, as well. Also, both people and search engines place a lot of value on the early words of a title.
• URL structure: One of the coolest things about WordPress is the way it allows you to edit permalinks from within a post page. (See Figure 4-2.) You can always edit the URL to be slightly different from the automated post title so that it contains relevant keywords for search terms, especially if you write a cute title for the post.

  For example, say you write a post about reviewing Facebook applications and title it “So Many Facebook Applications, So Little Time.” You can change the URL structure to something much more keyword based — perhaps something like facebook-applications-review. This reworking removes a lot of the fluff words from the URL and goes right after keywords you want to target.

  Figure 4-2: Editing a permalink.

  

• Image titles and other image information: Probably the single most-missed item Kevin sees when he begins helping a client with his or her SEO. You need to fill out the image information for your posts because this is a powerful way for people to discover your content and an additional piece of content that can tie keywords to your posts. (See Figure 4-3.) This information includes the filename of your image. Saving an image file to your site as DS-039.jpg offers nothing for readers or search engines, and thus has no value to search engines or for you because it doesn't contain a real keyword. Name a picture of a Facebook Application, for example, as Facebook-application.jpg. Leverage the keyword title and alt tags (alternative text added to the image within the HTML markup that tell search engines what the picture is) because they provide extra content for the search engines to see and using them can help you get a little more keyword saturation within your posts.

  Figure 4-3: The Add an Image page.

  

Using links as currency

If content is king, then links are the currency that keeps the king in power. No matter how good a site you have, how great your content, and how well you optimize that content, you need links. Search engines assess the links flowing into your site for number and quality, and evaluate your Web site accordingly.

If a high-quality site that has a high Google Page Rank (a value from 0 to 10) features a link to your page, search engines take notice and assume that you have authority on a subject. Search engines consider these high-quality links more important than low-quality links. However, having a good amount of mid-quality links can help, as well. (This tactic, like many well-known approaches to improving site rank, is based only on trial and error. Google keeps its algorithm a secret, so no one knows for sure.)

Getting listed on a blogroll, having a pingback or trackback when a blogger mentions your content in their posts, or even leaving a comment on someone's blog can provide links back into your site. If you want to check out how many links you currently have coming into your site, go to Google and type link:www.yoursite.com into the search text box and click Google Search. You can also search for competitor's sites to see where they're listed and to what sites they're linked.

Although you do need to try and get other sites to link to your site (called outside links) because outside links factor into search engine algorithms, you can help your own ranking by adding internal links, as well. If you have an authoritative post on a particular subject, you should link internally to these posts or pages within your site. Take ESPN.com, for example: The first time it mentions an athlete in an article, it links to the profile of that athlete on the site. It essentially tells the search engines each time they visit ESPN.com that the player profile has relevancy, and the search engine indexes it. If you repeatedly link some of your internal pages that are gaining page rank to a profile page over a period of time, that profile page is going to garner a higher search engine ranking (especially if external sites are linking to it, too).

This internal and external linking strategy uses the concept of pillar posts (authoritative or popular), in which you have a few pages of content that you consider high value and try to build external and internal links into them so that you can get these posts ranked highly on search results.

Submitting to search engines and directories

After you get some content onto your Web site (the rule of thumb is usually ten posts or so), submit your blog to some search engines. Plenty of sites out there charge you to submit your site to search engines, but honestly, you can submit your site easily yourself. Also, with the help of some plugins (described in Book V, Chapter 5), you can get your information to search engines even more easily than you may think.

After you submit your Web site or sitemap, a search engine reviews it for search engine crawling errors; if everything checks out, you're on your way to having your site crawled and indexed. This process — from the submission of your site through its first appearance in search-engine results — can easily take four to six weeks. So be patient: Don't resubmit and don't freak out that search engines are never going to list your site. Give it time.

Not to be confused with search engines are Web site and blog directories. Directories can lead to a small amount of traffic, and some directories, such as dmoz (www.dmoz.org), actually supply information to search engines and other directories. The main benefit of getting listed in directories isn't really traffic, but rather the amount of backlinks (links to your site from other Web sites) you can build into your site.

Although submitting your blog to directories may not be as important as submitting to search engines, you may still want to do it. Because filling out 40 or more forms is pretty monotonous, create a single document in which you prewrite all the necessary information: site title, URL, description, contact information, and your registration information. This template helps speed up the submission process to these sites.