Search Engine Optimization basics

By Alice Sneary

Type the letters ‘SEO’ into your favorite search engine and you’re likely to get a wealth of good ideas about how to appear on your favorite search engine. But beware the lure of the quick fix. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that can take months (if not years) to fully master. The good news is you can get started today, at no additional expense to your library. Simply put, SEO is the set of tactics you can employ to ensure your library rises to the top of a search.

Search Engine Optimization consists of improving the content and metadata on a Web page in order to increase its relevance ranking for specific terms and keywords on a given search engine. With a higher relevance ranking, the Web page’s listing on a search results page will appear higher and the Web page will attract more traffic and visitors.

Organic search listings (as opposed to paid or sponsored search) are the ones in the main body of the search results page and are always free. In fact, organic listings are never influenced by advertising—although this is a common misconception, according to Matt Cutts of Google, in a recent USA Today video interview with Jefferson Graham.

In that interview, he passed along a few key pieces of advice for Web sites:

1. Create good content. First and foremost, have good content on your pages written for humans—NOT search engines. Think about what people might be typing into the search box in order to find you, and then use that phrase on your home page two or three times. You don’t have to overdo it (called“keyword stuffing”), because after two or three times, an engine has a good idea that your site is about that keyword or keyword phrase.

2. Add your tag metadata. Title tags are important to search engines. Make sure each page on your site gets a unique title if possible. The description tag helps give the user a flavor for what’s behind the click when a page appears in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Finally, every image on your site needs an ALT tag. Search engine spiders cannot crawl images, flash or video content—so you may also want to publish text-only versions of popular instructional materials.

3. Generate link love. Part of how Google decides whether a site is high-quality or not is by how often it is refreshed and by how many other sites link to it. A great way to get fresh content on your site regularly is to start a blog. You’ll get authoritative links into your site and participate more fully in the community conversation.

4. Submit your sitemap. There are great tools and advice available from the Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer resource areas. One of the easiest ways to make sure your site is being crawled is to submit your sitemap to Google or Yahoo!.

5. Benchmark, measure and repeat. Before you get started with any of the tips above, make sure you capture where you are now, to be able to set measurable goals for your site.

Remember—SEO is a gradual process that is in a constant state of improvement. You will need to be patient to see results, but a commitment to long-term improvement will yield good results for your library.

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