SEO Tactics

Last Updated on Sat, 15 Oct 2022 | Marketing Apps

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vast topic, one that has birthed a cottage industry of SEO consultants, seminars, and books. Suffice it to say that I don't have enough space here to cover everything on this subject, but let's tackle the basics you should know.

<title> Tag

This tag, which is located within the <head> tag in your HTML code, displays the title of the page in the web browser's top title bar. Although that may seem fairly useless, it is actually quite an important tag when it comes to search engines and social media. The <title> tag is the primary link headline displayed in search engine results. Let's use the fictional Breadcrumbs app as an example:

<title>Breadcrumbs - Parked Car Locator App for the iPhone</title>

Notice how I incorporated not only the app's name and caption but also that it's an iPhone app. It's important to use strategic keywords in your title to help improve your ranking in the search results. When that page is listed in Google's search engine results, users will immediately know what it is by the link headline alone.

If you take advantage of one of the many free sharing services available, such as AddThis, ShareThis, and TweetMeme, to enable site visitors to share that web page with their friends, their JavaScript code that you've pasted into your HTML simply grabs that page's <title> tag on the fly as part of the message that's being sent along with the page's URL. With this mind, it's always a good idea to keep the character count well below 140 characters to promote easy retweeting on Twitter.

description and keywords <meta> Tags

Although these meta tags are not required, they should never been seen as optional. Also located within the HTML <head> tag, they are important elements that most search engines analyze when crawling your site. Although the keywords <meta> tag helps provide context as to the subject of your web page, the description <meta> tag is often used as the text description that is displayed directly below the title link headline in search engine results. Here's an example of the syntax:

For your description, to prevent it from displaying truncated in search engine results, try to limit its length to no more than 25 to 30 words. You can include a lot more than that in your keywords <meta> tag, but be very careful to only include keywords that are relevant to that web page. Don't try to "game" the system by including popular search terms that are unrelated in the hopes of getting broader exposure. That's so 1998. These days, modern search engines utilize extremely sophisticated algorithms that compare your meta keywords with the keywords in your main body text. Any discrepancies found will penalize your current search engine page ranking.

Not sure what keywords to use for optimal results? Try using Google's AdWords keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Although it was designed to help advertisers refine their ad campaign keywords, it can also help you determine the value of search keywords so that your keywords <meta> tag is loaded with the most optimized words. Another valuable resource is Google's Search-based Keyword Tool at http://www.google.com/sktool/.

Keyword-Rich Text

Like the keywords <meta> tag, make sure the visible text within the main body of your web page contains optimized keywords to help improve your search engine rankings. If your app currently has several competitors, check out their web sites to see what keywords they're using and how they rank in the search engines. Your goal is to place just as high, if not better than them, in the search engine results for similar keywords.

For all web images, make sure they include the alt text parameter so that search engines can still read their intended description. It's also a good idea to appropriately name your image files. For example, an SEO-optimized buy button might look like this:

Try to avoid using Adobe Flash on your web site whenever possible. Although it's a great web technology, it poses two serious problems for iPhone app developers. First, the iPhone OS' native browser, Mobile Safari, does not currently support Flash; it renders Flash objects as broken when viewed on an iPhone or iPod touch. And second, search engines have trouble properly searching Flash-based SWF files, so embedded text keywords may not get indexed. If you want to use the popular Flash Video format on your site, I'll talk more about how to best work with Flash in the section "Why Site Compatibility with Mobile Safari Is So Important."

Keyword-Friendly URLs

Following the theme of strategically named image files, if your app-specific domain name redirects to your existing company web site, you should also try to use strategically named directories and files in your URLs. For example, using a web site naming structure like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/iphone/breadcrumbs/

will help your site rank much higher in search results than a nondescript URL like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/sw/0901/page01.html

Maintaining Valid Links

Make sure to place default index pages within all subdirectories to prevent both users and search engine spiders from encountering 404 errors or "forbidden directory" warnings. Broken URLs can dramatically affect how your site is indexed in the major search engines.

XML Sitemap

This is a standard introduced by Google several years ago that enables you to submit an XML Sitemap file to Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Bing. The XML listing includes entries for all of the web page URLs in your site that you want indexed by these search engines. Within the XML, you can specify the priority (importance) of each page, the last date it was modified, and the frequency rate of changes. This sitemap helps Google, Yahoo!, and Bing discover pages on your web site that their search bots may not have found during their crawling process. And if you add or delete pages from your site, simply update the XML Sitemap file and resubmit it to Google and others for indexing.

To get started, visit Google's free Webmaster Tools site to learn how to create and submit your own XML Sitemap file: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. Google even provides helpful reports on any crawling issues found, as well as identifies any <meta> tag issues.

Never seen an XML Sitemap before? Here's a short example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url><loc>http://www.ebutterfly.com/</loc><lastmod>2009-9-30</lastmod><changefreq>weekly</changefreq><priority>1.0</priority></url>

<url><loc>http://www.ebutterfly.com/books/devsketchbook/</loc><lastmod>2009-9-30</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.9</priority></url>

<url><loc>http://www.ebutterfly.com/books/iphonebusiness/</loc><lastmod>2009-9-30</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.9</priority></url>

<url><loc>http://www.ebutterfly.com/iphoneinsights/</loc><lastmod>2009-9-30</lastmod><changefreq>weekly</changefreq><priority>0.9</priority></url> <url><loc>http://www.ebutterfly.com/helplogic/</loc><lastmod>2009-4-6</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.9</priority></url>

<url><loc>http://www.ebutterfly.com/company/</loc><lastmod>2009-9-30</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.6</priority></url> </urlset>

See how simple the syntax is? Within the main parent urlset tag, each child <url> tag contains the information for a different, unique URL in my web site (although keep in mind that my real XML Sitemap file is actually much larger).

If you're not comfortable crafting your own XML code within a text editor, you may prefer to use a sitemap automation tool. Here are a few:

■ XML Sitemap (Web): http://xmlsitemap.com/

■ XML-Sitemaps.com (Web): http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

■ RAGE Sitemap Automator (Mac OS X): http://www.ragesw.com/products/googlesitemap.html

After creating your Sitemap, submit it to the major search engines that support this standard:

■ Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

■ Yahoo!: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

■ Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/

If you're looking to learn more about search engine optimization, check out the free SEO Starter Guide from Google:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html.

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