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The Forgotten Fundamentals of SEO
By Chris Diprose (c) 2007

The Website Revelation – What owning a website actually means.

As a Web Developer and SEO consultant I deal with many existing
website owners who are looking to modify or improve their
website. I also deal with many people who are looking to start
their web presence with a new website. Through both of these
interactions there is often a common theme; a misunderstanding
or an attitude. I call this a misconception of reality, as often
the reality of what the Internet can actually do for the person's
business and what they think it can do differ massively.

Often it is presumed that by simply owning a domain and having a
website built and published on the Internet, thousands of people
will magically find the website, visit it and buy their
products. "If you build it, they will come" should be removed
from the vocabulary as soon as possible if you are to adjust
attitudes to the underlying search technology. As a businessman
in the real World, it is obvious that it would not happen
outside of the Internet either, so what is so different online?
Maybe it was the Technology boom 10 years ago that caused a rift
in understanding or maybe the buzz that caused the meteoric rise
in the stock prices of Tech Companies, I can hear the thoughts
of the small businessman, "surely this can be replicated for my
business" – in answer I would say, "well, it is unlikely, but
you should be able to achieve some results over time".

It is most important when taking on a project like Search Engine
Optimization for a website, to know that it is important to be
committed for the long haul. It is no small task and sufficient
funds need to be allocated to the project. Delivery deadlines
need to be correctly scoped against required changes, in order
to meet client expectations. The key points of responsibility to
the SEO project are in knowing that there are big changes near
the start and during setup, but the changes do not stop after
setup, there are continuous ongoing refinements to the design
and system over time. In this regard I find it important to
manage expectations and set realistic long term goals on what a
website can be expected to achieve and in what time frames those
goals hope to be met.

So what should your goal be when you are delving into SEO for
your website? Well, everyone's goal is exactly the same; improve
page rankings, improve page visits and hits and finally gain
more sales through the website.

When it comes to SEO and achieving these goals you have to have
principles and my main principle is, "Good websites get good
ratings and bad websites get bad ratings or none at all." As
time goes on with the improvement of search engine technology
and the refinement of search engine results this statement
becomes truer and truer. I believe in results through "white
hat" principles and methodologies.

What are "white hat" principles? I guess I would compare it to
doing things the honest way and the right way without risk. So
develop a good site, promote good linking, have good informative
content and keep working on it and then you are on the road to
good rankings through "White Hat" principles.

So, why should you do things the "white hat" way? Well, search
engines do have some kind of understanding, an artificial
intelligence. They soon catch on to websites spamming or linking
to websites with no relevance and bad cross linking. It's about
being smart, in for the long term and wanting your business to
grow organically, naturally.

So how do I go about improving my site and making it optimized
for search engines naturally? Well, that's why you're here! So
let's run through few of the things you should be doing in your
websites from a fundamental level.

Domain names:

When choosing a domain name, choose one that is relevant to the
product or service you are going to provide and that is as
simple as possible. There are considerations of branding and
product/service provided that should go into this choice.
Involvement of marketing personal and product understanding is
required but also consultation with your SEO professional is
advantageous. In this step I would say, take some time and
choose wisely. Keep it simple and easy to remember, often saying
it out loud will make it clear whether it can be understood by a
simple man.

It is a strongly held belief by many SEO professionals that
buying a domain which is older, and that has been around for a
while, means it will not be sand boxed by Google. What's the
sandbox effect? Well, it refers to what Google does to a website
or domain that is new or is relatively unknown by Google. In
many instances Google's Sandbox effect relegates the new domain
to sub-optimal inclusion in search results. Regardless of the
site's optimization it lowers the website's relevance and ranking
to the term searched upon. If you can use your old business
domain name, then consider this very important.

If, however, you are buying a new domain name, then keep it
relevant to the product or service being sold or offered on the
website. Keep it close, relevant and simple. Relevance is
primary.

Location specific domain or international domain ( .com or
com.au)? Personally I think dot com's are better, mainly because
they appeal internationally, but if you want to you can keep it
location specific and to your region, then consider purchasing
all similar higher level domains, yourdomain.com and
yourdomain.com.au, if you can.

Choosing a Host:

Fast, reliable and gives you all you that you need and want.
Preferably gives a unique IP. Again some SEO professionals
believe this can also have a detrimental affect in Google
rankings but from my experience it sometimes does and it
sometimes doesn't. I have had some sites come in with high PR
rankings on shared IP's and others when I shifted to a new IP
the PR of the site jumped, so this is still a bit of a mystery
when it comes to Google rankings.

Traffic Considerations:

When choosing your host ensure the plan you are on can
be expanded so that any new increases in traffic can be
accommodated accordingly.

Site Design:

There are several fundamental things to consider when you are
modifying or designing a website.

Flash:

Flash is/has been popular for a few years now and I truly
believe it has its place. It is a great way of showing many
products or services in a small area, has great visual impact if
done properly and can set a good friendly tone to the website
visitor. Having said that, I also hate flash; it can be an
absolute nightmare when it comes to search engine optimization.

What you should know about flash; it cannot be read by a search
engine as the search engine cannot read the text or the images
contained within it nor can it interpret what is in the pictures
being shown.

When it comes to flash I would suggest, not making your whole
website flash. If you are designing a new website and you want
to use flash, then use it in high impact areas to capture the
attention of your intended audience but use it sparingly. It is
important to ensure that as much text content (to a maximum
discussed in my next book, generally 300-500 characters) is
available on the webpage and in simple HTML.

Frames:

Many older websites were designed with frames. Frames are where
the main home page is actually a frameset page that includes
several other pages into it. This makes the page hard to index
in search engines and should be avoided. While Google does now
index framed sites, it is important to note that most of the
other top search engines still cannot follow frame links. They
only see the frameset page and ignore the rest of the inner
frames. This presents an SEO problem to us because it is highly
likely those inner pages contain our content keywords.

Nowadays this is not really a huge issue as it is so uncommon
for a designer to actually use frames, but the easiest way to
resolve the issue would be to enforce a no use policy on
frames.

Page Layout:

According to research the Googlebot trawls web pages from left
to right and top to bottom. So given this little tidbit of
information it is clear that you should be putting your most
valuable keywords and information on the left and near the top.
Of course this is a blanket statement and does not take into
account design principles and beautification. Just keep it in
mind during design of page layout. Position your more relevant
keywords to the left of the page and near the top.

Good HTML Coding:

A lot of HTML generator programs out there bloat HTML to the
point it is 3-4 times larger than what it would be if you hand
coded it. Keep it simple, use a text editor, edit your HTML the
old school way; until there is a HTML generator tool worthy of
use. If you can't code HTML, then do a search on the Internet
and find a decent, free, e-book and learn how to do it.

Javascript:

This is very popular among many web development professionals
for menu's, popups, scrollers etc etc. It would be my suggestion
to use simple plain HTML menus or as little javascript as
possible in web pages. There are many small javascript menus
out there that are slim on javascript code to reduce this issue
and make it almost negligible. Don't over clutter your site with
javascript as it increases page size, page load times and the
search engines won't understand it.

Image Sizes:

Keep them small and use only what you need to. This is essential
for decreasing page loading times and getting information onto
the user's screen as soon as possible.

Overall Page Size and Loading:

The overall page size is an important factor. It should load
quickly and be easily trawled. If you have followed the HTML
hand coding, used minimal javascript, used simple table layouts
and good image sizing, then you should be fine. There is much
evidence that supports the fact that Google and probably the
other search engines also, do not like to scan huge files, so
keeping your overall HTML page size below 25k is my suggestion.

Dynamic URL's & Page/File Names:

Dynamic pages are roadblocks to high search engine positioning.
Especially those that end in "?" or "&". In a dynamic site,
variables are passed to the URL and the page is generated
dynamically, often from information stored in a database as is
the case with many e-commerce sites. Normal .html pages are
static - they are hard-coded, their information does not change,
and there are no "?" or "&" characters in the URL.

Pages with dynamic URLs are present in several engines, notably
Google and AltaVista, even though publicly AltaVista claims
their spider does not crawl dynamic URLs. To a spider a "?"
represents a sea of endless possibilities - some pages can
automatically generate a potentially massive number of URLs,
trapping the spider in a virtually infinite loop.

As a general rule, search engines will not properly index
documents that:

• contain a "?" or "&"
• End in the following document types: .cfm, .asp, .shtml, .php,
.stm, .jsp, .cgi, .pl
• Could potentially generate a large number of URLs.

To avoid complications, consider creating static pages whenever
possible, perhaps using the database to update the pages, not to
generate them on the fly.

Slightly Off Topic Thoughts:

The topics covered here are not considered completely SEO topics
but in terms of overall objective – increasing sales, this
section is very important. Take these things on board, consider
them, consult with your designer and marketing team. Make
educated and informed choices on these topics when considering
your audience and what your website objectives are.

Screen Size:

Over 65% of all screens in the World are set to run at the
1024x768 resolution. Of the remaining percentage, 13% are
running at 800x600, 20% running at larger sizes and 2% are
unknown. So this affects the way you design. It would be my
suggestion to always design for the smallest user to visit your
site, but often I find 800x600 restrictive so I tend to design
for slightly larger. Not large enough to make an 800x600 user
angry but large enough to make it look good on larger screens
also. I size up my target users, my intended amount of content
and find some happy medium. I generally design for 1000x620 as
this is the perfect amount of real estate for a 1024x768 user
when they have the browser top bar and status bar and Windows
taskbar.

Colors and Themes:

One important aspect of marketing - selling - is the use of
color. Meanings are attached to colors in the same way meanings
are attached to words.

• Gold is the color of wealth and prosperity.
• White is the color of pure innocence and cleanliness.
• Pink is the color of femininity and softness.
• Green is the color of natural things and freshness.
• Red is the color of danger and stress.
• Blue is the color the calmness, intelligence. The majority of
the World selects blue as a favorite color. It often represents
"trust"

Use of color to establish an image or a brand is common in the
marketing community, yet when you visit the websites of many
search engine optimization professionals, it's obvious that
color significance plays no part in their own web optimization.
Some of the colors I found on SEO websites:

• Baby Blue, a color which implies weakness.
• Red, a color which implies risk, or danger.
• Orange a color which implies a cheerful "levity". Orange is
one of Americans' least favorite colors.

Although color selection is off topic for SEO, I would consider
it a very important factor in what SEO is trying to achieve, in
the end, for your website – selling more product, creating
loyalty to your brand and customer impact. Color research is
something you should seriously consider. In summary of color
choices, I would suggest studying and learning more about your
customers, researching color choices and their relevance to your
underlying products and making informed choices on these in
collaboration. If in doubt, then I suggest sticking to safe and
trusted colors within safe, eye pleasing designs.

Gifs for Logos & jpgs for Pictures:

Ensure you are using gifs for logos and background placements
and jpgs for photos on your website. This helps reduce size and
improve clarity of the web site overall.

Browser:

It is vitally important to ensure your web page works in both
IE, Firefox and Opera. Testing other browsers is also an
advantage, but these are the main three in use nowadays (2007).
I think quoting stats on the browser breakdown are irrelevant as
you need it to work in all browsers. W3C cross browser compliance
is great for this.

So, this brings us to the end of Volume 1: Fundamentals of SEO
Web Design. There are many things to consider when designing a
website or modifying a web site to make it more SEO friendly.
Clearly I have a few more volumes left in SEO for websites.
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My name is Chris Diprose and I am the Manager of Search Engine
Optimization Australia (http://www.kangainternet.com/
search-engine-optimisation.html) firm Kanga Internet. As part
of this organization my main goals are the improvement of SEO
for websites and dynamic content management systems. SEO is not
to be feared but embraced. If you are in doubt, then contact a
reputable SEO firm to help you with generating more web traffic.
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