I’m proud of this, because I wrote the XHTML that’s been helpful in optimizing enlivensoftware.com for robots like googlebot to understand the site and return it high in the rankings for search results lists.

How did I do it?
 
Header tags, Title attributes and Cross-linking, oh my!

Use the proper hierarchy of Header tags in your code. On the home page, H1 belongs to your logo and company name. H2 belongs to the main headline of the page and maybe your company’s motto if you have one. H3 and H4 can be headers of sections, like News or Events.

On your subpages, make your logo/company name a regular anchor tag linking back to the home page. Now H1 goes to your page name and H2 becomes a sub-header for dividing content. H3 and H4 can still designate page sections. It helps if your H1 matches your Page Title

Then you should put titles on those tags and on your navigation menu links. Hell, you can even put titles on divs! These titles should differ from the text in the tag itself. For example, you could have a link named “Events” and its corresponding title could be “Calendar of Events at Company ABC”. This is cross-linking and keyword density rolled into one swift move without overloading the user with too much fluff in the words they see.

Also, a good friend of yours can be the ABBR tag. It’s the tag you use to define abbreviations. In a real-world example, here’s the code I used for the logo for the new MHSAA web site we’re working on:

<h1 id=”logo” title=”Michigan High School Athletic Association”><abbr title=”Michigan High School Athletic Association”>MHSAA</abbr></h1>

Now Google and other robots will know what MHSAA means. That should help in future searches. It also helps that their domain is mhsaa.com.< You can submit your sitemap to google and use webmaster tools and google analytics, as well.

So these are simple ways you as a programmer can help your company and clients succeed in SEO. Don’t forget that you should start with a kick-ass writer, too.

We also worked with a professional web content writer to make the content more effective and search-engine optimized. This, coupled with semantic HTML, CSS, and google web master tools, will help this site rank high in keywords for Texas Dental Services.

So, please visit the site if you get a chance, and enjoy!

OK — here is where the actual change is:

——————–

AND (sw.Word like ‘%’ + @Word + ‘%’)

AND (t.IsDeleted = 0)

AND (t.DisableLink = 0)

AND (m.IsDeleted = 0)

AND (t.PortalID = @PortalID)

OR (m.ModuleTitle like ‘%’ + @Word + ‘%’)

———–

The bolded lines are the changes

First line is how the search term is matched. Instead of exact, it does a like. We found that a lot of clients would complain that searching “map”, for instance, would not return pages which had the word “maps” on them. Or “auto” won’t give you “automobile”.

Second is the disablelink line. We had the problem of hidden pages showing up in results but realized sometimes we WANT hidden pages to show up, but sometimes we hide pages because they’re not ready to be published. So I decided that if I “disable” the page then I definitely don’t want it to come up in the results, but I might want to keep it for later (we aren’t much for deleting pages around here)

Third is the OR m.ModuleTitle like ‘%’ + @Word + ‘%’ part — now this is kind of a subjective one. I have a web site right now for a client that sells insurance. Home insurance, life insurance, and car insurance. When I searched “car” I didn’t get the car insurance page at all, even though the page was titled car insurance and the module was titled car insurance… The content copy used the word “automobile” because this particular client is very traditional and was picky about that wording. So I added the “OR” line because if we put the search term in the title, it’s most likely relevant. We know module titles are what show up as the links on the SRP and so we make sure those titles are always relevant and helpful for the user.

BUT — we would like to see page name or page title as an option in the settings for how the text displays. we couldn’t figure out how to modify the core to do that.

OK that is all i hope this has been informational

PAGE TITLE: – the text that shows up at the TOP OF THE BROWSER and in GOOGLE / YAHOO / MSN et al SEARCH RESULTS

Why is the page title important? It is what the casual searching web user will see when searching for content / services offered by YOUR CLIENT. So the page titles MUST INCLUDE keywords relevant to the pageâ??s content. The page title should be formatted well and DEFINITELY BE MORE THAN JUST A COPY OF THE PAGE NAME. The client name should be included.

If you donâ??t know how to do a very quick keyword-density page title, then AT THE VERY LEAST, format your page titles like this:

PAGE NAME | CLIENT / WEB SITE NAME

So if your client is Artemis Solutions Group and the page is Web Design

You can AT LEAST type this much:

Web Design | Artemis Solutions Group

But if you want to be keyword-savvy (just do a quick search and read on SEO Page Titles and Keywords for quick reference)

You could format it like this:

Web Design & Development | Lansing, MI | Professional Web site Design | Artemis Solutions Group

Itâ??s worth a LOT to the client for us as developers to think about their web marketing strategy and how their content and custom features affect that strategy. A little bit of Usability goes a long way, and is very easy to do.

Proper page titles take minimal effort, and add superb value to the client.

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.