From its solid foundations WordPress is very ‘search engine friendly’ out of the box. Its default themes and template system are built on modern Web standards and the clean, valid code makes it easy for search engines to find, understand and index content. However, that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement for those wanting to take every possible advantage when creating exposure for their products or services.

The plugins I have selected today enable little tweaks and techniques to make your site play nice with search engines – and ultimately help them help people find their way to you.

Making your site search engine friendly

Google XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are a tool webmasters can use to make it easier for search engines to understand the structure of their site and index pages more accurately. This plugin automates the process of building and updating a sitemap and runs quietly in the background. When you first fire it up, you’ll be prompted to build a sitemap manually. Following that, every time you publish a page or post the sitemap will be updated automatically.

Many standalone, 3rd party tools are available for creating sitemaps quickly. However the ability to automatically update your sitemap every time you post, and check search engines picked it up in-tact, saves a lot of time and keeps things neat and tidy.

KB Robots.txt

Another handy Webmaster tool is the robots.txt file. This is a simple text file that sits on your server waiting to instruct search engine spiders on which pages and directories they should and shouldn’t add to their indexes. For example, on our corporate site we have a testing directory where we try new things and show clients work in progress for their feedback. We don’t want these test pages to accidentally show up in search results so we don’t allow any search engines to index them.

Robots.txt files are easy to write but, like a lot of my recommendations in this series, having a WordPress setting page to manage it is very handy and keeps things neat. This plugin does exactly that. Once installed it offers a simple textbox for editing your robots.txt, then when you save the changes it will create or update the file right away.

All-in-one SEO Pack

Last, and by no means least, we have what is arguably one of the most valuable plugins available for WordPress. As its name suggests this plugin is like a Swiss Army knife for managing important aspects of your site’s SEO.

Most of its features give you more control over your metadata (extra information embedded in a Web page to describe its contents). Including your keywords in these metadata elements makes your site more findable for potential customers who are searching for products or services like yours.

The crucial areas of metadata for SEO are page titles and meta-descriptions. Search engines heavily rely on these to understand what your site is about, and commonly use them to make up the snippet shown when your site appears in search results. All-In-One SEO Pack lets you edit these elements on a page-by-page basis, and if you know how to use them it can make a huge difference to your rankings and click-through rate.

Something Google et al frown upon is duplicate content. With blogs this can be a hard thing to avoid (mainly due to category, tag and archive pages being very similar and numerous). All-In-One SEO Pack lets you instruct search engines not to index these navigation pages and concentrate on your destination pages (i.e. the valuable stuff). Another time-saving feature of this plugin is automatically generating canonical URLs. I would be going way off-topic if I described those here, but for anyone who is interested, this post from SEOmoz explains what they are very well.

Note: I have also heard good things about a similar plugin called Headspace 2, but I haven’t studied it in detail yet.

So I hope your WordPress plugin fix has been satisfied for another week. Next week will see the final part of the series (well, maybe the final part. There could be more), where I’ll share some recommendations for analytics plugins and cool tools to track visitor behaviour on your WordPress blog.

It all depends on what you’re searching for, right? If you already know the name of the business, it makes sense to flick to the appropriate ‘white’ page. But if you only know the name of the service ‘yellow’ is the way to go.

This same rule is applied to Google everyday by millions of users across the world, often without a second thought. One might search for ‘4 wheel drive cars’ or ‘Subaru Legacy’. ‘Backcountry packs’ or ‘DaKine’. Maybe even… ‘Web Design’ or ‘Tactic Group’.

So which approach is typically you? Yellow or white?

Today I came across this post by Seth Godin entitled ‘How to make money with SEO’ – sent to me by my esteemed colleague Doug (thanks for that mate and sorry to steal your thunder). The title did nothing for me so my initial impression was not one of shock and awe, but the first couple of paragraphs certainly got my interest:

There are two ways to use SEO to help your organization. One is reliable and effective, the other is a glorious crap shoot that usually fails but is wonderful when it works. I’ll start with the second.

The most common way to use search engine optimization is to find a keyword (like “plumbing”) and do whatever you can to ‘own’ that word on Google. This is Google as the Yellow Pages (with free ads).

The Yellow Pages are terrific for plumbers, because if you need a plumber, that’s where you’re going to look. Buy the biggest ad, be the first listing, you get calls. Google is a revelation because it’s a super Yellow Pages and it’s free! The problem: how to be the first listing, because being the 40th listing is fairly worthless.

Well the obvious answer to that is paying for a sponsored listing. But for this scenario let’s ignore that. So what’s the alternative so the Yellow Pages?

The other way to use SEO is a bit more organic. (Let’s call it the White Pages approach). It involves owning a keyword that you already own. Do a search on ShoeMoney in Google and you’ll find 340,000 matches. Wanna guess who’s first? ShoeMoney. Why is this surprising? After all, he invented the word and he owns the domain.

Someone hears about Jeremy’s site from a friend or from a blog or from some other source. They want to visit his site and they type it into Google. He told me that he gets five times as much traffic from this search term as any other on Google.

The power of this technique is that with determination and patience, you will certainly win. It requires inventing a trademark and then building a business or service or organization around this trademark that people actually talk about. You want to be able to say to someone, “just type ____ into Google.”

This is the simplest description of the two main SEO strategies I’ve ever come across – hence the post here on Tactical Thinking. But let’s draw some parallels in our own industry…

Type ‘Snowboards’ into Google and you’ll get 5,450,000 results. Quite a lot really. Now type in ‘Lib Tech’. You’ll see Lib Technologies comes up first, but where were they in the ‘Snowboards’ search? Half way down page 6!

Years of persistence and brand building (plus the help of a particular superstar snowboarder) has put the Lib Tech name near the top of recognised brands in the snowboard marketplace. But I ask you this: What would have happened to them if they had just jammed a web site full with key words like ’snowboards’ and hope they might reach the top?

Of course, this is somewhat of a moot point as Lib Tech were around before web sites and have been building their brand for years. But you can see the parallels and hopefully this helps you understand the importance of building a brand over time rather than just getting heavy with SEO and Google Adwords.

Take the time to read the rest of Seth’s post. He finishes it off with a nice and simple step-by-step guide for following his ‘White Pages’ approach.

When it comes to adding content to your website imagery is an invaluable tool for creating a visual impact, setting the theme of your site (and your company) or showing off your high-quality products. However, all of that is only possible once someone has found your site and decided to pay it a visit.

As Keith discussed in our last SEO feature one of the keys to creating a successful website is making sure it is easy for search engines to understand and describe to the audience. In essence, creating a user-experience that says the right things to your customers but in a way that also talks to the search engines, which in turn will bring those customers to you.

So what part do images play in talking to search engines and getting traffic to your site? Well, only a supporting role it has to be said, but here is an explanation of how they can play that role well.

Search engines and web content

A search engine’s goal is to provide the user with the best possible answer to the question they ask. They achieve this by sending out software programmes known as ‘robots’ or ‘spiders’ to crawl across the web tirelessly, analysing sites and indexing the results into their databases, ready to provide to a searcher on request.

This interaction between websites and spiders means the goal of a business wanting to be findable is to ensure all content is available for search engines to properly analyse and accurately index. A practice known as ‘being search engine friendly’.

Your content (text, images, multimedia etc. all combined), is essentially the message you want to communicate to your audience. So, you want to make sure the whole message goes out intact to as many people as possible. Search engines will happily do this on your behalf but will only pass on the message you give to them.

Using images to get your message across

The power of imagery — such as photos, your company’s branding or information graphics — will get the message across quickly to someone visiting your site. Although to a search engine spider, which deals in text and can’t see the contents of an image, the message stops dead.

If part of your message is only conveyed by imagery this important information will not be picked up and understood by search engines, and in turn will not be passed on to search engine users. Effectively lost in translation.

A good example would be Company-X creating an advert for a special offer they’re running on widgets. They produce an eye-catching photo of their top-of-the-range widget with the words: “Half price widgets this month only!” beautifully typeset in the graphic and publish it right in the middle of their homepage.

Unfortunately for Company-X, a search engine spider would not view the image and would simply log the fact that it’s there. The important message that “widgets are half price this month!” would not make it through to the hordes of eager widget-buyers searching the web for the best place to buy new widgets.

Providing text equivalents of non-text content

So how could Company-X make their images search engine friendly and get their important message picked up by text-only spiders? Quite simply, by optimising their images and providing text equivalents.

There are a number of ways to reinforce images with text content, ready and waiting for search engines to pick up and pass on to searchers:

• The ‘Alt’ (Alternate) attribute
  An ‘Alt’ attribute is used in HTML and XHTML to attach a text alternative to images in web pages. This allows the content editor to add a short description explaining the meaning of the image for users who can’t see it. This feature was initially designed to cater for blind users or those who have set their browser not to display images, but it is also the foremost way to explain the content of your images to search engine spiders.
• Captions and surrounding text
  Search engine spiders also look at your page for text surrounding an image as a way of working out what that image is about. In some cases it is worthwhile to include a caption next to your image. This lets you associate more information with the image that may not necessarily explain what the image is showing, but explains more about why the image is on the page.
• Image filenames
  While spiders are not able to see what is in an image, they will find the image and are perfectly able to read its filename. So bear this in mind when you’re naming the image files for use on your site. As far as search engines listings are concerned an image named ‘widget-sale-Jan2008.jpg’ will be much more explanatory than ‘widgets.jpg’.

In this example from the BBC you will see two of the above methods in action. The logo image for this UK television programme describes the subject of the article visually. The image then has the alternate text “Ski Sunday”, communicating this same theme to search engines. It is also connected to a caption reading: “Ski Sunday returns to BBC Two on 20 January”, which adds more context to the image and its relation to the story.

So that wraps up our intro on making images work for you (rather than against you), when it comes to SEO. The aim for this article was to show you the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of optimising images for search engines. Keep an eye on this SEO series for follow-up posts explaining more on the ‘how’ of working with images.

This post is an overall description of what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is and why it is so crucial to businesses within the winter tourism industry.

The definition of SEO

SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via ‘natural’ search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it ‘ranks’, the more searchers will visit that site.

Put in layman’s terms, SEO means making your web site ‘findable’ to a larger number of people.

The validity of SEO

Questioning the importance of SEO? Well, think about this…

When looking for information online the first point of call for the vast majority of today’s web users is one of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN). This is particularly true for users who are unfamiliar with brand names and products in the market they are exploring. Here’s an example:

John is an English-speaking skier looking for information on where to ski in Japan. He’s never heard of any Japanese ski resorts, only of Nagano – the region that hosted the Olympics not so long ago.

He enters “japan ski resorts” into Google, however no actual ski resorts appear on the first page, only tour operators and online resort guides. To find out more he now has to search through one of the online guides or continue through Google’s listings hoping to find what he’s looking for (something that very few users do).

What if a ski resorts own web site appeared on the first page? John’s life would certainly be a little easier – and the resort would be more likely to welcome John as a customer and holidaymaker.

The search engine concept

A search engine is the middleman between you and your audience. Your web site speaks to the search engine, which then speaks to the potential customers when they ask it about a company or services like yours.

Try to think of search engines as travel agents: a travel agency is the middleman between the destination and the tourist. Much the same as a travel agency promotes destinations search engines promote web sites.

Having said that, for a travel agency to promote a tourist destination properly it requires some information first; brochures, prices, maps… you get the idea. Search engines require information too. Your web site MUST provide this information if it is to succeed.

What’s more, search engines will favour sites that provide information to them in a way that is easy for them to interpret, categorise and accurately describe to search engine users.

Written content that ‘speaks’ to search engines

Search engines look for written content in web sites. A web site without any written content in a format that the search engine can understand becomes very unproductive.

For example, a web site full of images (that may even include written text) does NOT speak to search engines. Web sites with impressive animations and no written content are only useful if the users are already looking at it, not if they are using search engines to find it.

‘Content-rich’ is a term applied to web sites that feature in-depth written content. Generally speaking, the more relative written information your web site contains, the larger your audience will become. There are of course other contributing factors here, but that’s the nuts and bolts of it.

The relevance to winter tourism

With the ever-changing and somewhat unreliable snow seasons (thanks Global Warming!), winter tourists are travelling further a field each year. The closest ski region to one’s home can no longer guarantee a consistent snowfall. Skiers and snowboarders are constantly on the search for fresh destinations and a new adventure. How best to research these new horizons? Using the World Wide Web of course!

Well-established snow sport regions can begin to expect more and more visitors from countries further away. Resorts in Japan can target Brits. Chalets in Europe can focus on the Chinese. Cross-culture marketing is now crucial for all winter tourism businesses with SEO being a primary influence.

Your web site

Take a moment to look at your web site. Re-cap and ask yourself these questions again:

• Is your web site really reaching its intended audience?
• Is it ‘findable’ through search engines?
• Is it promoting your business?

Want to learn more? Over the coming months we will be writing a series of SEO-related posts for you to indulge upon. Topics to cover include keywords, meta-tags, language translation, content mark-up, headers and optimising images for search engines.

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