Mark’s Blog

The Polymorphic Podcast had an interesting show on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to get better rankings on Google. Michael Neel takes us through some good tips to optimize your site.

A few things stand out from the interview:

1. Meta tags are almost useless.
2. Don’t try to fool Google with CSS chicanery. Using white text on a white background to inject search terms on a page may get your site black listed.
3. To optimize your results, focus on four areas.
   1. URL – try to get appropriate wording in the URL.
   2. Title – make sure the title tag contains text which is appropriate and specific as possible.
   3. H1 – make sure you have only one and it clearly is targeted to the result you want.
   4. Content – of course the content should be relevant to the search ranking terms.
4. Use Google’s webmaster www.google.ca/webmasters/ tools to find errors and optimize your results.
5. Make sure that don’t have different URLs that point to the same page. Google may think you’re gaming the system.
6. Creating a Site Map Xml (see www.sitemaps.org ) to tell search engines where all the pages are and what priority they have. The meta data on the XML file is useful to the search engine and will increase your trust with the search engines.