A Primer for a Long Term Plan for Progressive Dominance of Internet Search Engines
I've been search engineering web sites ever since Yahoo was in a garage. In 1994 I built a crude organic gardening web site to help people garden without synthetic chemicals. In 1996, I started supak.com and realized I was winning searches for organic gardening. So I figured out why and how, and started doing that for friends' sites. When I was hired to build a web site about Hawaii that would do well on the engines (long since defunct), word got around that I could do this, and I started getting clients who wanted their Hawaii information to get higher search engine ranks.
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Crossposted at
Search Engines Blog for Higher Search Engine Ranks.
We've all heard about google bombs. Linking to a web site with consistent anchor text, say, the next President of the United States, helps make that site show up higher on Google on a search for those words. During the 04 campaign, their side was doing it to waffles, and our side was doing it for miserable failure. I hope every blogger and webmaster uses creative linking to help progressive causes show up higher on the search engines by linking the anchor text of important keywords to web sites that help our side of the argument. A prime example today, following the medicinal marijuana ruling, would be to link marijuana to norml.org, and to link medicinal marijuana to safeaccessnow.org.
But search engine optimization (SEO) goes way beyond linking anchor text. How a web page looks to the google bot, or other spider that crawls it is very important. The most important of this, called on-page optimization, is the title. In the HTML of every page there is a title tag. It tells your browser what to put at the very top left of the frame. At the Daily KOS, diary writers should try to put the keywords their diary is most about in the diary title (maximum 9 words or so), which then becomes the page title, and gets big time points with the search engines.
Other SEO tips for Daily KOS diary writers and other progressive bloggers:
- Put keywords and phrases as near the top of the page as you can, using h1 tags if possible.
- Use Cascading Style Sheets to keep your HTML clean.
- Use complete sentences.
- Use the verb forms of noun keywords, and vice-versa.
- Put keywords and phrases at the beginning and end of a paragraph, if possible.
- Have at least 200 words of text on every page.
- Try to keep your key-word density around 5%, but don't overwork it and don't sweat it too much.
- Make your code as clean as possible.
- Use keywords in image ALT tags.
- Provide RSS feeds and subscribe to those feeds using MyYahoo and other feed readers.
There are plenty of places on line to learn about SEO. I just wanted to put out this primer for progressive bloggers to use to get started. Every diary or blog entry you make on an issue should try to follow these basic rules.
I've used the Daily KOS as an example because it is one of the best known progressive blogs, it is more of a community, having more users, than many others, and it has a Google PageRank of 7, which is very good. That page rank means that everything the KOS links to gets improved by association. Those of us with outside blogs and websites can help even more by putting links to the KOS on our sites, and especially linking to pages inside the KOS, like the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, always using the keywords in the link itself (anchor text).
Improving the SEO of the actual diaries at the KOS will also help raise the total site's Page Rank as well as make those diaries show up higher for their particular keywords. Linking to particular diaries deep inside the KOS will also help the search engine spiders like the Google Bot index a larger chunk of the site for even more keywords.
How much good will this do? Recent surveys have shown that larger and larger percentages of Americans are getting their news from the internet. Other surveys show that Americans trust their favorite search engines. As these trends continue, it can only help us to be winning for searches on subjects that affect the political debate and future of this country. With minimal effort, progressive bloggers can make a big difference in what sites win for what searches.
And remember, these rules generally apply to comments too.