Subjectivity of Search Engine Optimization

From How To Do SEO by Eric Holter

But Did We Get it Right?

The process of search engine optimization can be a subjective one. I did my best to analyze and think about the subject, translate it for effectiveness and did a bit of research on usage and spelling. I put our phrase in all the right places. Now I have to wait and see what happens. It can take a few days for search engines to spider a site and find new pages. And even then it can take a little more time to see these pages to show up in search results.

The NewfangledCMS has some Google optimization tools that help me monitor whether my new page has been spidered or not. You can also use Google's webmaster tools to

Watch the video!

monitor spidering and indexing. Our tools show a Google box on the top right of our pages when logged into the CMS. It shows page-by-page how many times someone searched for content in Google and ended up at each page. It also shows me the last time Google's spider (GoogleBot) hit our site and when it got to this specific page. Finally, I can see what phrases people used to get to this page. This is the information that's most helpful. Search engine optimization is an iterative process. You do your best to come up with accurate phrases but sometime you'll discover that people find your content using words you never anticipated. Seeing these phrases helps to adapt titles and phrases to match the way people search.

Next month I'll pull up Google Analytics and runs some custom reports that will tell me how my site is doing. In fact, by then these pages will have been online for a few weeks so we'll be able to see what kind of traffic we're getting. I'll see you next month!

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Susan Petracco | February 28, 2008 10:50 AM

Eric,

Thank you for the article - it's a great introduction into optimizing a site for search engines, and your approach is terrific.

I do think it's important to note the importance of the description meta tag, however. You write, "You can also place your target words and phrases in the keywords and description fields....As a result search engines pretty much ignore these fields."

While this is true in terms of the rank of a webpage, the description field is not ignored when it comes to the display of a webpage. Often, search engines (including Google) display the description meta tag as the "blurb" of text that appears below the site name in the results pages. This blurb influences the decision of the user to click through to the site, so taking the time to write a good description meta tag is really important to click-thrus, if not to rankings.

On the other hand, I totally agree with you about the keywords meta tag. We're even exploring removing that altogether, in an effort to simplify clients' on-site SEO maintenance.

Eric Holter | February 28, 2008 11:55 AM

Hi Susan. Thanks for the comment. You're right of course. Description are sometimes used in the search results. I tend to prefer the "snippets" that Google generates with the relevant parts of the page text in bold, so I don't usually give my descriptions much thought. Maybe I should.

Allan Joseph Cagadas | June 7, 2011 10:47 AM

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the article, I learned a lot of stuff in the video especially on which steps to take first. Though search engines changes their algorithms especially google from time to time, at least I get to know more about the basics. Hope to see more updated videos from your blog.

Alex | November 30, 2011 4:54 AM

Very well written. Very unique, impressive, and helpful information. Thank you for sparing your time to write all this in detail