Introduction

It may not be immediately visible at first, but even multimedia practitioners have to learn a bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics as they are at times required to create websites for their clients and employers. Search Engine Optimization is a term used for methods of putting a website into favourable spots in search results. Note that SEO techniques can come in different flavours and that some of these are not exactly examples of fair play. Often people hear of Google Bombs and Spamdexes, a couple of well-known methods that are not particularly liked by companies that run search engine services. These will not be covered here. The author intends this article to be a quick brief guide for multimedia practitioners on SEO’s, as there seems to be a lack of sources regarding the topic for this kind of audience. (I’m a multimedia student who has recently become interested in SEO’s.)

How Search Engines Work

Back In the Day

Search engines often use mechanisms such as “spiders” and “crawlers”, cleverly named for their single task: To “crawl” the web for sites and collect data from them. In the old days, these algorithms were simple word listings. Take for example a gardening site that would likely have words such as “plant”, “soil”, “fertilizer”, (and “gardening”, obviously) and so forth. A spider takes note of these findings and puts them in the search engine’s database. When a user types any of the words mentioned above, the URL of the page that had those words will show up in the results. However, due to the sudden boom of Internet users, simple listing of pages with the included keywords became more tedious for the user to read. So some engine developers started ranking their results by the relevance of the keywords to the pages. The Vicious Cycle Begins

This technique would likely make use of Meta tags that are found at the head of a page. The problem is when some webmasters realized that putting unrelated keywords in the headers would put their sites in search results that are not that related to their pages’ topics. Going back to the gardening site, putting extra words like “mp3″, “sex”, and “UFO” in the meta tag in addition to the gardening articles in the body would make the gardening page pop up in a search result of someone trying to find free mp3s, for example.

The algorithm, while brilliant, was too simple and soon more sophisticated additions were bolted into it for more sensible results. By this time they were making search engines check the domain name, URL, emphasised text (like this), and attributes of an image for this to work.

However, because of the said elements’ availability to webmasters (as they know quite a lot about html code), these were still highly susceptible to abuse and ended up the same way as the keyword tags.

A New Era

When Google came along, it brought itself a new way to list pages called PageRank. Basically it ranks pages by the number of other pages linking into it, running through the logic where the pages with more links are likely to be more reliable. Because webmasters could not simply control the number of links going into their pages, it proved to be quite a good algorithm.

But the webmasters soon discovered this and developed ways to generate their links, thus rigging Google’s search results to their favour just like in the previous engines. The problem was really never fixed, and instead the Google people opted to increase the sophistication of their methods by including more ways to rank their sites. These new methods are now kept secret by their developers, though the “discovered” and “speculated” ones include tracking the age of the site, domain, and content, the reliability of the sites that provide the incoming links, and the domain of the link providers (they could be in the same domain, which raises suspicions).

And Now

The list has grown up to more than a hundred things to check. And by this time search engines would prefer to keep their methods to themselves as trade secrets. Also, because of this, the SEO communities are now largely working more on (intelligent) guesswork and experimentation.

What Can We Multimedia People Do?

Helping Users Helps

Firstly, take advantage of as many of a tag’s attributes as possible. Students often ignore such things as the “alt” in tags (author is guilty of it as well). One can do a lot of web users a favour by making use of the alt attribute to let them at least have an idea of what certain images are all about should they fail to see them.

Of course, you do not have to place an alternative text to all of your images (seriously, do all layout filler images need to be explained?). However, on certain instances such as company logos and illustrations, one will want search engines to take note of these pictures, so stuff up the alts on that one.

Page titles also may come into scrutiny. Especially in sites that rely heavily on Flash where sometimes tag. Not only would it give users more tolerable load times (and they are such a drag), it can at least let search engines know that there is more to a page than the embedded Flash movie.

Another attribute one may wish to look at is the rel=”nofollow” of the ever handy tag, which prohibits the engines’ spiders from crawling into outbound links. Following the logic of search engines, we know that spiders follow links in order to explore for new sites to categorize. But with a “nofollow” in the rel attribute of a link, the spider will tend to ignore it, keeping other sites out of the engines’ evaluation mechanisms. While it may sound greedy to keep the spiders for oneself, consider the fact that blogs and guestbooks these days are open prey to spambots (which posts links about enlargement pills among other things). One may need to prevent such abuse in his or her site.

On a rather silly note: when typing in keywords, consider the fact that not all Internet people are top spellers. Legions of them spell liek this. Take advantage of this fact and type all possible misspellings of your keywords in your wordlist. Listing British words also help, as they have their own way of putting in words like “colour” and “lorry”.

Less Clutter for Better Listings

One must try to make their pages as clean as possible. Too much code will likely index a page the wrong way. Therefore, try to create pages that do not have to rely too much on Flash and frames (however tempting they may be these days), and comments should not be too long. “Commented Out” html (often used in testing certain variables/elements/etc) should be deleted before uploading. Commented out scripts like JavaScript should ideally be placed in a separate “.js” file. The same applies to “.php” files.

For example, a page that is to displayed using PHP should not be a long document filled with lines upon lines of long script inside multiple holders. Keep the scripts in separate files in a folder and make the displayed page call them with include() functions.

Try to make a habit out of compartmentalizing your elements as shown above. It may seem unwieldy at first, but later as the site expands, updating will be much less of a hassle as you only need to concentrate on the content of the pages itself, leaving nitty-gritty work to files comfortably snuck in their folders. Styles should also be treated the same way, by putting as much of the style specifications in a separate “.css” file.

CSS Also Helps

Speaking of CSS, try to utilize CSS more in layouting. CSS can help in eliminating possibilities of using tables. Tables, as one may know use a lot of tr/td tags, which one can possibly do away with in CSS. By letting CSS handle the placement of elements, the pages will be freer of tags, allowing engines to see the CONTENT more clearly. Besides, tables of images tend to load slower, anyway.

In addition to layouting, try making use of header tags (from h1 to h6) as header text could get pretty attractive to the engines in addition to making your pages looked nicely formatted. With CSS you can take header tags a step further by putting specifications for them in a style sheet.

Time Can Be an Ally

People tend to go after certain things at certain times. Mall owners know this, thus they change their motif according to season. Christmas season is the season of jingle muzak and sales, Valentines is for red-themed giveaways, and so forth. Do take note that it is possible for people to enter such words as “cards” or “flowers” or “bikinis” in their search bars during certain times when they become in season. And this is not only limited to selling gift items. There is a tendency for students to use search engines during certain parts of a semester for their research and homework.

Link Saves the Day

Ask any SEO person about tips on getting better listings and that person will very unlikely miss a thing about getting links. In fact gathering links has almost become *the* SEO method of choice. This is one of the ways to get a pure flash site into high spots (flash sites are quite hard to optimize because search engines do not tend to bother looking inside a .swf file). So having a lot of friends can help a lot, because they can give you legitimate links.

Also, having a blog and mention sites being SEO’ed can put one’s pages up a notch or two. In one blog index, a whole set of links are already generated and words will tend to be repeated for an impressive number of times. And this is just the blog server, generating things.

Getting into a niche, or a group of particular topics, can also get you a bit more of an edge. Targeting local topics adds more hits. It will not be much, but at the very least it can contribute to a site’s ranking.

How Not To SEO

The author of this article personally finds the following methods as forms of “cheating” and should be avoided.

Inserting text coloured the same as the background and placed somewhere in the page or in a (mostly) fake “No Frames” page.

Shameless repetition of random keywords hidden inside the regular text. Sometimes one may do it on the Meta tags.

Link farming, which is having a community of pages that link to each other. While in essence there is nothing bad in this concept, the whole idea seems rather silly.

Waiting for domains to expire and buying them in order to make pages filled with nothing but links to one’s pages.

Spamming in blogs and guestbooks. This is just bad.

Creating a spam blog. While blogging about one’s site projects is nice, nonsense topics and filling them up with links to sites is not good blogging behaviour.

Using badly designed web pages and filling it with keywords and using it as a “doorway”. Complete with “Click to Enter” link. As a multimedia practitioner one is advised never use this technique.

These methods can create an annoyance to those who wish to truly optimize content for to attract potential customers, as well as to the users who repeatedly find spam ads. Search engine companies do not approve of such methods and will likely delete guilty parties from their databases and even take legal action when necessary. So getting caught doing these is not a very good idea.

Conclusion

The world of Search Engine Optimization is just as vast as Multimedia. Oftentimes, many web “design-centric” designers, especially beginners, prefer to leave the optimization business to SEO specialists. Contrary to what people believe, even multimedia people can get into relatively high search rankings by optimizing the code and site structure of their works. However, this article is not intended to be the “end all” for a designer to SEO. The information offered here was gathered and compiled such that people unfamiliar with the complexities of search algorithms (but can handle an html coding session) could understand. By the time you are reading this, there might be a new search algorithm being developed or a technique to capitalize the ones we have now. One can never know. So keep your senses sharp and happy optimizing!

Sources

I did not make this whole article up. Who am I kidding? I read a whole lot of stuff even before typing in the section titles.

SEO for Newbies

On Old-School Search Engine Algorithms

More Old School Algorithms, this one less confusing

The Birth of Google (used to be some college guys’ thesis)

Good SEO using CSS

Proper Coding Makes Good SEO

SEO In Ten Bullets (some of them not featured here)

How America Searches

On Wikipedia

Bad SEO

Home of the SEO Rockstars

These People Kind Of Made Me Write This Piece

These Guys Too

Posted in General SEO Knowledge | 1 Comment »

Posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 6:35 am under General SEO Knowledge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.