If you own or are considering a website, you’ve probably heard the terms Search Engine Optimization or SEO about a thousand times.  The term (so long as you know what the letters stand for) is self explanatory.  Optimizing your website for search engines sounds like a good idea, as most people still find what they’re looking for using a search engine.  SEO is as much an art as it is a science, and the experts are usually not that far above the folks who do common sense things as far as results.  This makes it confusing, and more than a little intimidating to new folks in the web realm.  Before you pay the possible $50,000 to an SEO pro, let’s talk about how to make sense of it, shall we?  Here are four simple rules (or suggestions).

SEO isn’t as confusing as you might think

Rule 1:  Search engines read text.  If your site has no text, search engines don’t know how to find you.  Examples?  OK, any site done entirely in Flash is an example of a difficult to optimise site (notice I didn’t say impossible).  Flash, while pretty and cool looking when done properly,  is practically useless when it comes to search engines.  I’m not saying not to use flash, I’m saying to use it sparingly.  More on that in another post.

There is also a segment of web artists who try to be all things to their clients, yet lack the skill set of writing CSS.  They tend to leave buttons as images and / or embed text in images.  This is fine if you do it properly but if you do it wrong, no search engine traffic.  It’s far better to use style sheets and text in every place you can.

Rule 2:  Search engines have customers too.  Odds are, you have a website as an extension of your business.  If so, you have customers (or want some).  As a business, you provide your customers what they want.  If you didn’t, they wouldn’t stay customers for long.  Search engines are the same.  Searchers come to them to find the page most relevant their search.  If engines sent searchers to pages that had nothing to do with their search, you guessed it…  The searcher wouldn’t come back to that engine.

How does this information help or hurt you?  Well, Google, for instance, puts a lot of time and energy into making sure the results to searches are accurate and relevant.  This means that they find all the ways people cheat the system and make their search engine ignore those people (or actively shun them).  That way, the searcher finds his 18th century Amish swimwear and not a site about how to make a billion dollars in ten minutes on the Internet.  Make your content match your audience (after a few weeks, this post might rank for Amish swimwear).

Rule 3:  Get your link out there.  Every blog post you read, comment on it (including this one).  Every forum you visit, leave a comment (constructive).  In the comments section of most blogs and forums, there is either a slot to type your website, or a signature block in which you can type your address.  Put your web address in your e-mail signature, on your business card, carve it into a tree…  Just get it out there.  What does this have to do with SEO?  Search engines count the number of links back to your site.  More = good, and your rank goes up the more you post.  Enough said.

Rule 4:  Don’t stress about SEO.  Take a more Taoist approach to it.  If you want more organic search traffic, write more about your topics of interest.  Nothing is more relevant to search engines than a well written article on the subject a searcher is looking for.  What this means is, if your website does not have a blog, you’re wrong.  Blogs are the best way to get free traffic, and I’d go so far as to say building your site on a blog engine is one of the smartest things you could do.  WordPress handles 90% of the SEO stuff for you, so why not take advantage?

This is a cursory overview of what I do for SEO, and I get a lot of first page Google results for very little time investment.  I do it as a part of all the sites I design, and on whatever CMS my client uses. What do you do?  I’d love to hear about it (even if you think I’m an idiot, and I’m doing it wrong).  If you have anything to add, feel free to do so in the comment block below.

Image Via Wikipedia

When blogging, three things take up most of my time.  Well, they did.  Spelling and grammar, text beautification and linking the post to outside sources.  Let’s say you mention the book, The Elements of Style in your post.  You want to dig up the Amazon link so that you can possibly make some money, but you don’t know if you should mention it because your spelling and grammar are terrible (guilty) and you hate the way every time you write the number 2nd it just lays there all flat.

What to do?  Well, you need a few things…

WP-Typography:

This plugin, simply put, rules.  It handles the difficult task of hyphenation, superscription and subscription of things like exponential notation and cardinal numbers, and making pretty fractions.  Even if you don’t write in a manner that requires any superscript or fractions, the hyphenation is priceless.

Probably the best thing about this plugin is it’s set it and forget it nature.  Turn it on, do some minimal configuration and you never need to babysit it again.  I install it by default on all client sites, just like the next two.

After The Deadline:

Yet another indispensable plugin.  This one takes the generic spell check and turns it into a spelling, grammar and style checker.  That’s right, I said style.  If you use a lot of huge words or trite expressions, this smug little plugin will reign you in.  It’s almost painful how much it corrects me.  I used to think I was a good writer.  Now I know I’m a hack.  Reading other blogs convinces me that nearly everyone needs this plugin.

Let’s say you need to use words that aren’t standard dictionary words, but that you know you spelled properly.  It remembers not to check them, and you can add a list in the configuration before you even write.  Brilliant (although not any different from a user dictionary).

Zemanta:

So, you type a bunch of stuff, you want to find out where the post enhancing links you know exist might be, but you decide to make people search for them on their own.  Not good, because you know people are lazy.  That’s where Zemanta comes in.  It reads as you type and offers images, links, Amazon references (complete with your affiliate ID) and tag suggestions.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve published what I thought was a great article only to remember later that I didn’t tag the stupid thing.  No more, however.  Inside the tag box are a number of keywords which would make excellent tags.  Just click them.

The same is true of links.  Just below the editor block are a number (depending on the content of the article) of blocks.  Click one and the first occurrence of the word is linked to either a Wikipedia article, a home page, or even the Amazon product we mentioned earlier.  Time to get an Amazon Affiliate ID if you don’t have one…

There are several more plugins I find indispensible, but these three are the post edit powerhouse I use to keep things tidy and user friendly.  Two of them require API keys, but all are free, like most other WordPress related plugins.  Give them a shot.  I can’t blog without them.

This was a WordPress theme re-design that involved a new optimized background image (the old one was huge and less stylish), a company name image revamp and lots of style sheet work.  The product is pretty timely, and if you’re an investor, you should look at it.

We took a few backend items in this site and made them work together, so there is an underlying membership (continuity) component, as well as a payment gateway and newsletter function.  It has an auto-responder and a few other nifty gadgets, all on a simple, almost minimalist substrate.  The whole thing involved a great deal of education so that the client could manage the site himself.

I really like the look, and the client was pleased.

Smith Investment Management

I did this site for fun, but I still dig it.  I want to have more time to update it and put interesting things on it.  The purpose of this site is to chronicle my journey toward energy independence.  It happens to be pretty green.

I’m looking for guest bloggers on this one.  If you think green, and want a place to write, this is the place.

I wanted it to be green, and the logo is all original and ment to resemble a wind generator.  I did this in an afternoon but I must admit that I was inspired by another blog I saw. Sadly, I can’t remember which one.  When I remember, I’ll properly credit.  In the mean time, here it is.

Independent Struggle

This site was done for a friend.  It’s a simple WordPress blog with some really offensive colors.  It’s an example of when using warning colors is a good thing.

The goal of the site is for my friend (and anyone else he invites) to blog about his experiences with his ex-girlfriend, their child and her inability to deal with / in reality.  I seldom get involved in the politics of the thing, but I do design according to subject.  Having been there, I had a good bit of inspiration.

I made heavy use of golds, oranges and yellows in this design, with reds as accent colors.  Probably the only non-offensive color in the whole mess is the blue text.  I’m especially proud of the devil horns as major heading markers.  It’s something to behold.  His current wife said, “It’s pretty!” when she saw it.  Whatever you say, sweety.

I did his Twitter account as well.  Based on the fact that he hasn’t added content in a while, maybe she found out about it…

My Ex the Nutjob