Blogging Primer - Part 3: Building for Search

In our ongoing conversation about successful blogging, we’ve touched on how to get readers and how to keep them. Today’s topic is a little bit more technical as it deals with some of the underlying aspects of search technologies, engines and what I like to term “smart code”, or “smart HTML”. It pays to understand some of these concepts in at least a basic way.

There is a key difference between the visual web that most humans see and interpret and the semantic web that computers interpret. Since the Googles, MSNs and Yahoos of the world are computers, it’s a good idea to try to see the world through their eyes. Incidentally, this argument can easily spill into another area of web development that is hot on the forefront of conversation these days - accessibility. I’ll try to avoid that particular topic to focus on how blogging is and can be affected by poor markup, poor linking and poor subjects.

Markup
Markup is the HTML and CSS you use on a site. For beginners, it is the styling behind your site. Most blogging platforms handle most of this in the way of themes, stylesheets, templates, etc. However, you, and not the software, control your entries. You decide what is going to be italicized, boldface, or… God forbid… blinking.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo read your site from top to bottom, left to right and ignore the things they don’t understand. The most important things they do understand are the following features:

• <h1> - <h6>: These are header tags. Most blogging platforms give you an entry for a subject line which becomes the heading for the entry. This is pretty much transparent, but some people may want to put other headings within their entry. This is perfectly fine but certain things should be taken into account. Search engines interpret headings as headings and thus, as very important. These are prioritized from <h1>s being the most important and usually reserved for page headers and titles and on down the list. For what its worth, the most commonly used entry header in WordPress is an <h2> and so entries which use headers should be <h3> and below.

  The content of these titles is taken as very important and should be used to effectively attract search engines. Descriptive text for your titles will garner you better search results. If you have a subject that is titled “Another Day” you will likely not recieve alot of hits on that entry. However, if you use a subject such as “Microsoft has Ruined Another Day”, you will definitely get my hit!! :-)

• <a>: These tags are called anchor tags and are the key ingredient in links. If you use to <a href="http://www.espn.com">ESPN.com</a>, you will very simply get ESPN.com. But what the search engines likes is what is included in the text of that link, in this case ESPN.com. That is a descriptive bit that tells the search engine what the page you are linking to is all about and serves as a keyword for searches. Use your text wisely to garner the best results. Also, link often and to lots of places. The more you link, the more reciprocal links (links coming back to your site) you will get.
• Tag Semantics: A good place to get a basic idea of standards-compliant HTML is at W3Schools.org or, if you are a glutton for technical reading, the official XHTML 1 Transitional Spec. Some of these sites don’t explain the “whys” about why somethings matter more than others. Back in the day, if a user wanted to display font as boldfaced, they could simply use the <b> tag as it meant “bold”. In the semantic web, this tag is replaced by <strong>. To the human eye, they do identical things. In the semantic web, the difference is much more key. The difference is between display and emphasis. “Bold” simply means boldfaced the selected font. “Strong” means we are putting a “strong” focus on it as a point of importance. The same is true with the <i> and <em> tags. They both display as italics. But the <em> tag denotes a special emphasis. Search engines pick up on these nuances. If the blogging software you use endeavors to maintain standards compliance, they may provide you the tools to help you write compliant entries. WordPress, for instance, provides Quick Tags that can be used for this purpose.
• Permalinks: This term is really a fancy word invented by bloggers to denote the absolute URL to a single entry. It’s a permanent link where the story can be found even after six months have passed and the story has disappeared off the front page of your blog. Some search engines out there don’t like URLs that have tons of variables passed in them. For instance, <a href="post.php?post_author=administrator&post_id=474">Permalink</a> can be seen as a non-search engine friendly URL as many search engines don’t see anything past the ? - essentially neutering the link. MoveableType and WordPress both offer methods of creating search-engine friendly archives and URLs. But even if your software does not provide an easy method to do this, as long as the site is hosted on a non-Windows server running mod_rewrite enabled Apache server (quite honestly, this is most web hosts), then these URLs can be generated. It won’t always be easy - I can attest. But it can, and really should, be done.

There’s alot that can be done to create a blog that will be well indexed, earn a good Google PageRank and Yahoo! position, but the effort will need to be made to incorporate key word, “buzzwords” if you will, into your posts to ensure that you will be recognized for such a post. This is by far the most critical aspect of blog growth, as far as I’m concerned. It pays to take an extra minute to make sure all your links are using descriptive texts, your headings aren’t too vague, but perhaps aren’t too specific either (that can hurt as well).

Next time, we’ll dive even deeper by looking at some of the key features and pitfalls among the various blogging platforms.

Tagged as: Blogging