Nov

19

Some SEO advice to start things off.

Filed Under General Advice |

Please note that this initially appeared in slightly different form on Kevin Church’s personal blog.

OK, so. Let’s talk about search engines and your website or blog, ok? I promise this isn’t going to hurt and it may benefit you if you’re currently lagging behind in some critical area. It should be pointed out that all of this is just general, broad advice. If you’re a comics shop owner or small business looking for analysis and recommendations, I’d be glad to do that for you at a reasonable cost. Contact me at kevin(at)searchpeers(dot)com.

First, lets get META
The header of your blog or website is where Google and the other search engines first check get some basic information about your site, from the META tags that offer a description of your site’s basics. These are not some kind of magical solution to your search engine rankings, but they can contribute to your site’s overall rating in non-Google search engines. What they definitely do is provide is an easy reference for your site’s visitors when they use Google. For instance, when people search for BeaucoupKevin, they get this:

You see that? That’s the DESCRIPTION tag in action. In fact, just to make the whole thing a bit simpler to understand, here’s my site’s META information, as placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

<title>BeaucoupKevin(dot)com. BlogMachineGo.</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="comic, comics, comic books, comic book, comic blog, comic blogs, nerd blog, geek blog, kevin church, beaucoupkevin, beaucoup kevin">
<meta name="description" content="A weblog devoted to pop-culture ephemera, centered around comic books.">
<meta name="copyright" content="Kevin Church">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="1">
<meta name="distribution" content="global">
<meta name="robots" content="all">
<meta name="rating" content="14 Years">

Let’s break all this META stuff down with just a bit more detail and use the fictional comic shop that my webcomic The Rack is set in as an example.The title tag should be pretty obvious - it’s what displays at the top of the browser as well as what people using the search engines get for your site’s name. I’ve gone for a cutesy title, but if you were a comics shop in Southern California, for instance, you’d want to make it something like

<title>Yavin IV Comics: Comic Books and Toys for The Valley Since 1990.</title>

If someone bookmarks the site, the title will be visible in their browser’s bookmarks, so make it as clear as possible.The keywords tag has been pretty much deprecated by the major search engines because of abuse, but I keep it in there anyway. It doesn’t hurt, and it means I’ll rank a bit better on Inktomi and Teoma. I’m sure you’re asking “Who?” and my answer is: “I don’t know, either.”

As I mentioned, the description tag allows you to provide a blurb about your site. Usually, only the first 250 characters or so are displayed, so brevity is key. In the case of Yavin IV, I’d make it something like

<meta name="description" content="Located in the Elm Terrace Mini-Mall at 129 W Highway 23, we've got the comics and graphic novels you want in-stock! Call us at 9CO-MICS!">

That’s only 137 characters and gets the important information across so it’ll display in the search engine results, giving customers the information they need easily.There are other META tags, but to be honest, they’re basically there to help the search engines determine spam versus non-spam blogs. Make sure your keywords tag is filled with relevant data, have the rest in place, and you’re not going to be penalized for looking “fake.”

If you think all that coding looks hard, then download Metty. I use it almost every day at work and it’s really quite helpful.

Securing A Better Ranking For Your Online Shop or Comics Website (Bloggers Need To Read This Then Keep Going, OK?)
First thing’s first: lose the Flash intro page, lose all the Flash-based functionality on your site, and move to CSS and HTML. The search engines understand HTML, but do not have eyes and mice to click on your fancy interface, instead opting to go to the less-pretty, horrible competitor down the street who’s made sure that they code everything with them in mind.

Now that you’ve done that, read on.

In the case of Google, the most important thing for a website to have is keyword-appropriate inbound links from “quality” sites that aren’t reciprocated. With something like a themed blogging community, this isn’t particularly easy, but for some resources like, say, a quite-good Swamp Thing website or a comic strip, it’s a bit more manageable. Inbound links are like this are one of the reasons that Wikipedia has such a high PageRank highly in so many categories: people use it as a common reference, causing individual pages to have a higher ranking. Google uses the number and relative quality of these links to assign a website a PageRank from 0 to 10. (Just so you know, this number is named after Google founder Larry Page and really shouldn’t be thought of as your site’s “ranking” compared to your peers as much as a general guide to your placement in the overall structure of the web.)

One way to help you secure keyword rich, quality links is to make it easier for people to link to you. You will occasionally see sites offering easy link codes and/or buttons. In the case of Rich Handey’s Roots of the Swamp Thing site, I’d include something like this on the homepage:

Think this is the best Swamp Thing site out there? Link to us!
Roots Of The <A href="http://www.swampthingroots.com“>Swamp Thing</A>: The Best Resource For Swamp Thing and Constantine Information.

While not everyone will use this exact code, those that do will offer a bit of a boost while others may just link to Roots of the Swamp Thing, which still offers a keyword boost as it has “Swamp Thing” right in the text and the URL. While buttons with the appropriate ALT text can serve as links, they’re just not as good as an old-fashioned keyword-based link.The second easy-to-do part of this whole Google ranking thing is making sure that each page of is keyword rich. Let’s go back to Rich’s Swamp Thing site for just a moment. The phrase “Swamp Thing” appears 36 times in the body of the main page, giving him a keyword density of 2.08%. Honestly, it’s not a hyper-competitive keyword like “Credit Card Debt,” but I’d recommend he increase the frequency, perhaps making sure to include it as a title in certain areas and avoiding other names for the character if possible. As his homepage features frequent updates (Google thinks this is very good,) this would be my only real advice outside of getting more links that include the phrase Swamp Thing. The second-tier pages in his site should be written in a keyword-rich way as well, giving Google a greater chance to point people searching for something like swamp thing comic 1982 to a page on his site.

This doesn’t really apply in Rich’s case, as he’s a verbose fellow, but there should be at least 350 words on any given page on a site. My current assignment is in a very competitive field so I shoot for a high keyword density (around 10%), but you may well find that a 3-5% density gets the job done on your Adam Strange fansite. If you’re a retail shop in a certain area, I’d recommend including the full address and phone number in a common place on every page. That way, if someone types pewter novelties sheboygan, they’re more likely to get a better, locally-based result.

I also recommend getting that any “static” non-blog site get an XML Sitemap to help Google spider the site’s text more effectively (and some say more often.)

Finally, include keywords in your site name and individual page URLS whenever possible. A page about the fictional Yavin IV’s graphic novel selection, for instance, should have a URL that’s something like http://www.yavin4comics.com/graphic-novels/. More information on keywords in URLS and the relation to on-page text can be found here. It should go without saying that the Title tag for each page should be as relevant as possible, perhaps something like Graphic Novels at Yavin IV comics in this case.

Securing A Better Ranking For Your Blog
A lot of the advice given for websites is really quite relevant, but there are some specific things bloggers can do.

One of the things I’ve been wanting to touch on was the fact that I’ve gotten a couple of emails (literally, it’s like two in the course of three or four years) wondering how I’ve managed to dominate the search engine results for my name and wanting advice for that, as well as some general advice on having a blog rank better. A lot of the the latter was covered in my general blogging tutorial, but this here’s a chance to go into some specifics.

Here’s the short version of ranking well for your own name in a comics blog: use your real name as the author name. This is easy enough to do in Blogger and WordPress. With a site like mine, this means my name shows up 20 times on the front page with a lot of content attributed to me. This, combined with my META tag information and inbound links, makes Google think that this is the best resource for Kevin Church-related information. Outside of things like linkspamming or Googlebombing, I’m going to hold onto this for however long I do this thing or until the bluegrass musician of the same name gets his act into gear.

If you want to rank well for something, make sure you use the keyword phrase in the post title. If, for instance, you want to write about how horrible you found the latest issue of Countdown is, your title might be something like Countdown #41: The Equivalent of Paul Dini Spitting In My Eye. In the case of Blogger and Wordpress, this will also embed the subject in the URL (a very good thing) if you follow the advice below.

Please note that doing these will most likely destroy the individual page links you currently have but will make it easier for future linkers to point visitors to the exact point in which you went too far in calling for Dan Didio’s head.

Anyway.

Using Blogger.com?
Log in and go to Settings> Archiving> Enable Post Pages> Yes. Republish your blog.

Doing this creates an individual HTML page for each post, making it much easier for visitors to link to an individual post versus linking to an anchor in a weekly or monthly archive. This has two benefits, the first being that visitors to your site don’t have to sort through very much before getting directly to the relevant information. Secondly, by making a keyworded-loaded post that’s linkable on its own, you make your blog more attractive to search engine spiders, boosting your position for, say “Ultimate Aunt May Slash Fiction.”

Using Wordpress?
Log in and go to Options> Permalinks> and select it to Date and name based. This makes your individual posts much more keyword-friendly if you’ve followed my post title advice.

Blog permalinks should be very easy for visitors to find. I’ve made it so that the titles for each of my posts offers a permalink. This was done using the following code in my Blogger template:

<h3 class="post-title">
<BlogItemUrl><a href="<$BlogItemUrl$>" title="external link"></BlogItemUrl>
<a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" title="permanent link"><$BlogItemTitle$></A>
<BlogItemUrl></a></BlogItemUrl>
</h3>

Most Wordpress templates I’ve seen do this automatically, but just in case yours doesn’t currently, here’s the code for your index.php and single.php files:

<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

OK, that’s it for the technical stuff.My final bit of advice is something I said the first go-round on this whole “advice” thing and should be pretty easy to follow: write frequently and interestingly, be social, link to others when appropriate, and take some time to surf around and comment a bit. By their very nature, blogs are social things written by social beings. It’s amazing what spreading a bit of your own sunshine can do for the garden as a whole.




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