How do you ensure your site stands out from the horde of zombies clawing for your customer’s attention? Search engines. Get rid of search engine road blocks and set your site up for success. Understand how search engines work, the ways they see your site, and what they do to ingest your content.

Search Engine Optimization: How to Make your Site Stand Out from the Apocalyptic Horde

Search engine optimization is a zombie-fighting profession unto itself. The majority of the work is finding the keywords that describe your product/service/thing and sprinkling them throughout your pages, plus removing anything that makes it harder for search engines to read your page.

This book lays out a base level of how search engines work and what you can do to set your site up for success. We’ll discuss roadblocks and how to stop getting in your site’s way. This is the book for everyone who wants to make SEO less of a giant black box and more a small gray box whose inputs are clearer. You may not hit number one just by reading this book, but you also can’t hit number one and stay there without attending to the things we’ll cover.

Search Engine Optimization

Preface

A search engine is any site that allows you to type in keywords and get results. The search engines we’re looking at will crawl the content of websites other than their own and display results to users. (I make this distinction because a few powerful, important search engines that are beyond the scope of this book are Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon. Think about all three of these sites as you look to publicize your site/content, but none of them will ingest content from your domain or show a link to your website in their search results.)

What Are Search Engines?

While their goals are many and varied, the primary goal of search engines is to stay in business and (hopefully) make money. The best way for them to do that is to keep people using them for search. That means providing the best, most useful, most easily accessible, and highest quality search results. The more your site does to support those goals, the more likely the search engine is to feature it. (And, yes, they also want to sell ads, but they know you won’t come to their search engines and see ads if the search results aren’t good.)

What Do Search Engines Want?

There are three parts to a search engine: the user interface/search box, the database that holds all the content, and the search engine "spider" or "bot."

How Search Engines Work

While a lot of search engine optimization is about the words you use, there’s also a number of code related changes you can make. The following special tags and attributes are not part of the HTML specification, but the major search engines have agreed upon them. That said, every search engine that implements one of these tags may implement it differently. For instance, Google won’t even go to a nofollow page, while Yahoo/Bing will go to it but won’t count it as part of the index of the previous page.

Special Tags and Attributes

Meta description: This is a thirty- to fifty-word description of your site. It is sometimes the snippet that search engines display with the search results, so make it short, descriptive, and punchy.

Meta Elements

Add the following rel attributes to  elements (links) to give the search engines direction about if and how you want content from that link incorporated in your search results.

Rel Link Attributes

Link canonical : This specifies the canonical version of the page—that is, if you have two pages that are the same or similar but you can’t outright delete either of them, you pick the best one and set the canonical link on both to the better page. In this way, the duplicate content won’t hurt your rankings because the search engine will attribute all the content of both pages to the page you made canonical/the one everyone should look at.

Link Elements

While it can take lots of time and effort to do keyword research well, these are the basic tenets. Keywords are the words people use to search for something—that is, what they type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for. That could be a product to buy, information they want, or any number of things. Keyword research involves not only figuring out what words your customers use to search for your products, but also what words your competitors’ customers use, as well as what words people use that neither you nor your competitors have found. Once you have that list, then you can look at how competitive those keywords are and decide what keywords you want to work toward ranking in search engines for.

Keyword Research

Many of the things that help SEO also help make your sites both more accessible and more usable. The following list is not comprehensive, but it will help make your site easier for spiders (and humans) to read.

Best Practices for Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are several off-page SEO considerations, meaning things that aren’t in a page’s code.

Off-Page SEO

The easiest and least accurate way to check is to ask a zombie. Since they do not know of your site and are scared of search engine spiders, that won’t help much. Next, you can use the search engine to search for your site and/or some site specific keywords or phrases—for instance, "undead.institute" or "getting braaains should be fun." The downside is that you might forget a word or not find all the ways your site was categorized.

Ways to Check if a Search Engine Crawled Your Content

Look at your website and what keywords you want to rank for. Work those keywords into your content. On at least the top level of your website (home page and main navigation pages), do the following: Add canonical links. Add at least one meta robots tag. Add a link hreflang for the default language and a meta http-equiv. Make sure all images have alternative text (empty alternative text for decorative images also counts). Remove any "click here" language and ensure that link text is descriptive. Ensure all headings are descriptive. Run your HTML through the validator, and correct any errors (https://validator.w3.org). Add meta descriptions. Ensure any advertising or user-generated links use the proper rel value Make a plan for addressing any long-term changes, such as adding a mobile-optimized version, an SSL certificate, and most other off-page SEO needs.

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Search Engine Optimization

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