Okay, so you’re not a computer programmer or a Web developer. That doesn’t mean you can’t take care of business for your site by using simple text with appropriate HTML links, and lots of clear writing overall, to create a basic improvement in your search engine visibility. Here are some things to watch:
Page title
These are the words that appear atop a browser page – and they’re key. It helps to be consistent. For example, make sure you include your organization’s name at the end of every page title. It also helps to include general descriptive words and phrases. For example, if you’re writing the titles for pages on “LocalCinc” (a site we’ll say covers Cincinnati news), you might make the title for the local politics page something like “Cincinnati Politics, News, Opinion and Analysis—LocalCinc.” That way, someone searching for “Cincinnati politics” or “Cincinnati news” will be more likely to find your site.
URL
The Web address for your site should be consistent. When you create new pages, your URLs should contain relevant keywords if at all possible. (Most blogging platforms and content management systems allow you to specify this preference for the URLs they generate for your pages.) This provides a clear-cut structure for users, such as: site name/category/relevant keywords. For example: www.localcinc.com/politics/Cincinnatti-mayor-reelection.html is a better URL than www.localcinc.com/section/blog/politics/0479n2awimmp.
Create clean HTML code
Whether you’re editing your site’s HTML code yourself or have someone else helping you, make sure your code is not laden with a lot of misdirection or fancy applications near the top of the page’s HTML. That just gets in the way of search engines trying to figure out what your page is about. Keep it simple and clean. And any text your users would be reading on the page should definitely be visible in the page’s source code (don’t worry too much about that one – most simple Web publishing programs take this approach).
This is a key reason why you should write your content either in an HTML editor (like Taco Edit for the Mac, or NoteTab for Windows), or in the interface provided by your blogging platform or content management system (CMS). Generally, you should avoid writing your content in a word processing program like Microsoft Word, since word processors create cluttered, nonstandard HTML that search engines can’t index as easily
Also, don’t paste directly into your CMS or blogging tool anything you’ve copied from a word processor unless you first cleaned the text. To clean word processor text, first save the document as plain text, and then copy and past from that. This will eliminate extraneous formatting codes that could confuse your publishing tool, as well as search engines.
Tags for images, video and graphics
Most publishing software allows you to “tag” and “title” your videos and graphics with keywords and text, to describe what they are. If possible, put these content elements on their own pages and give them unique titles. Still images (such as digital photos) should be named according to what they show – i.e. Condoleeza_Rice.jpg instead of image1.jpg. Also, give your photos descriptive text in the image’s “alt” field. (Alt text is the text that appears when you mouse over an image. It also helps visitors who are vision-impaired. And, of course, it’s useful to search engines.)
Informational pages
Content such as your “Contact Us,” “About Us,” and other general pages should include clear key words and other phrases that define your site and its mission. Search engines pay attention to this when deciding how to match your site to relevant queries.
Location
Clearly state whether your site is intended to serve people in a specific geographic area. Include the city or town and state name in page headers. Also, put your street address — including zip code — in your Contact Us page, as well as in your site’s “description” meta tag. (More info on that later.)
Link text
When creating a link on your site, use descriptive language to refer to the specific story or page that is the link’s destination. Avoid using plain vanilla text such as “click here” or “see the story.” Instead, make your link text something like “view the Clampett oil strike video,” or “Acme vs. Coyote legal filings.” Search engines will be much happier with you.