Development Tips: Search Engine Optimization—A Beginner’s Guide

One of the pronounced themes this year is“Learn from Marketing.” On August 23 and 24, The eLearning Guild will hold a Learning from Marketing Summit. During the summit, best practices from marketingwill be examined and applied to L&D.

One common practice in marketing is the use ofsearch engine optimization (SEO)—where content and content structure (mostoften in HTML5) is massaged for easy indexing by search engines in hopes of amore prominent listing position.

Many of us have content on the web. This guidewill help you create content that Google and other search engines will easily findfor people looking to learn on a daily basis.

Start with a search

Let’s say you wanted to learn about naturaltreatments for the common cold. You are likely to type a query like “commoncold natural remedies” into your favorite search engine. My search yieldedresults from sites like WebMD, Health.com, and WellnessMama.

Figure 1: A great deal oflearning starts with a Google search

Generally, if you’re putting information outon the web, you want people to find it. There are literally thousands of siteswith information about natural cold remedies. How did both well-known sites andlesser-known sites make it onto the front page?

In reality, there are a number of factors. Google’salgorithm is, of course, highly proprietary. Experts estimate there are over200 factors that determine where your site is listed for a particular Googlesearch. Some factors you can control, some you can’t.

What you can’t control in SEO

There are dozens of factors that are just outof your control when trying to optimize a page for search engines. For example,the age of your domain, your domain history, and your domain’s countryextension all influence where your domain appears in a search. Aside fromletting your domain grow older, there is little you can do to influence thisfactor.

How your HTML influences search

How you structure your HTML code andinformation relative to the keywords that people are searching for is animportant influencer of your search ranking. Here are a few of the importantfactors that can improve your search results:

• Your title tag. Does your keyword appear inthe title tag? A strong title tag might be:
  <title>Natural Cold Remedies</title>
  Some experts have noted that the title tag is likely your bestopportunity for a search engine to determine what your page is about and whattype of traffic to send.
• Your meta tags. Meta tags describe your page,and although they have much less influence than they had a decade ago, theystill are important:
  <metacontent=”Several natural cold remedies are discussed and compared forefficacy.”>
  <meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=UTF-8″>
  Meta tags go inside the head section of your HTML document.
• Using your keywords inside of heading tags.Google assumes your page is related to your keywords if the keywords appear insideof heading tags like this:
  <h2>Natural cold remedies</h2>
• The density of your keyword used in the body text. Using the keyword(s) throughout your body text, without overdoing it,is an art. You want a keyword density between 0.25 and 2 percent. Err on theside of caution when it comes to keyword density. Keyword stuffing, which isthe overuse of a keyword in an attempt to fool the search engine, can get asite penalized.
  To check your keyword density, you can use a free tool (Figure2).

• Content length. All things being equal, longercontent wins. Google assumes longer content equates to more useful information.
• Using keywords in your image alt attributes.Images provide a nice opportunity to use your keywords. You can use thekeywords in the alt attributes enclosed in each image tag like this:
  <img src=”picture.jpg” alt=”Naturalcold remedy echinacea pictured”/>
• Ensuring your site is optimized using responsive design will also give you a bump in the search engine ratings. Realize thatmore and more searches are mobile and Google wants the information it indexesto be available to all users.
• Placing the keyword in the page file name. Thiscan be another influencer of your rating. For example, if you name your pagenatural_cold_remedies.html, your URL will appear like this (Editor’s note: This URL is only anillustration—not a real page):
  https://www.site.com/natural_cold_remedies.html
  Your filename alone won’t be enough to improve your rankings. However, combinedwith other factors it can have influence.

Off-page SEO factors

There are a number of other factors that can influenceyour search ranking that are found outside your HTML and content. These factorsare more difficult to control than the on-page factors listed above.

• The number of domains linking toyours. Google and other search engines look at a link to your page as a votefor its quality. More “votes” results in higher rankings for your page. Thequality of the pages linking to yours is also a factor. A link from Harvard to https://www.site.com/natural_cold_remedies.htmlis more credible than a link from UsWeekly and is weighted as such in the ranking algorithm.
• Closely related to the factorabove, the number of individual pages linking to your site is important aswell.
• Link context is also important,according to some experts. For example, homepage links are said to carry moreweight than interior links, and links within the content are assumed morevaluable than links in the sidebar.

In the end, Google’s goal is to provide thebest information for a search term used. If you provide good, focusedinformation on your page with relevant keywords, your chances of success arestrong.