Web Development by Joe Sak

Last December, I took on the task of doing my first real Search Engine Optimization (SEO) job for one of our clients: Modern Metal Processing.

If youâ??re unaware of exactly what SEO is, itâ??s basically an organic internet marketing technique where you format your siteâ??s content for search engine robots such as Googlebot to be able to read your site, understand what itâ??s about, and find your pages.

First, SEO isnâ??t just about making your site search engine-friendly. Itâ??s most important to ensure that your content is User-Friendly. Your content should be easy for your visitors to read, understand, and find pages with more content and information on subjects that interest them. Go figure, right?

My favorite example of a site that is well indexed by Google but doesnâ??t offer much content for users is Britney Spearsâ?? Guide to Semiconductor Physics: The Physics of Optoelecgtronic Technology. If you search for â??Britney Spearsâ? on Google, you will probably always find this site near the top of the list. Why? Because the person who made that site knew how to make it matter to search engines.

As funny as it is, it illustrates that even if your search rank is high, your content still matters to users.

Iâ??ll get right down to a few of the things I did for Modern Metal Processing in December that have given them tremendous results on Google in the last couple months.

• Implemented friendly URLs
• Replaced generic content with specific keywords like â??heat treatmentâ? and â??brazingâ?
• Added useful keywords to the Alt tags of all images (note: I didnâ??t add any keywords. I added keywords that describe the image)
• Linked any instance of the keywords and images with keywords in the alt tags to their respective pages that contain more information
• Restructured content so that easiest and most scannable content was up front for the siteâ??s visitors (Usually bulleted lists can help shorten otherwise bulky paragraphs. And theyâ??re perfect for links!)
• Formatted all links to include helpful, descriptive text and keywords. This increases the rank for pages and helps the user, rather than a generic â??click hereâ? or some other such old technique.
• Checked that every navigation element and important image and all content on the site is text readable by disabling CSS through Firefoxâ??s Web Developer Extension
• Added a valid robots.txt file to the root of the site to block useless pages from the index (like login)
• Added a valid sitemap.xml file which is automatically generated through server technology
• Added MMP to Google Webmaster tools for easy tracking

And the results?
Within a couple weeks, MMP went from 1 or 2 pages in Google index to 29 (thatâ??s all their pages) They are now getting front page results on generic search terms: Top search queries and their average top position

• modern metal – 8
• modern metal processing - 1
• heat treating michigan - 9
• metal process mmp - 2
• heat brazing work - 3
• what is heat brazing work - 3

You can download their full query results table and view it in Excel.

So what have we learned?
Content is the most important aspect of web pages. Not only should it be readable to the robots, but most of all helpful to the siteâ??s visitors.

The client allowed us to change up their content as much as necessary to cause results, even if it meant hurting egos by not including that content which may not be very helpful or useful to the visitors(or at least not making it the top most important content on the page).

We were allowed to make links within the site that are helpful to the user, and we were able to include and arrange the keywords in a  tasteful way that helps the user and the search engine robots.

This is just one of the things we do at Artemis every day.