Search Engine Optimisation for Online Publishing

Search Engine Optimisation is a crucial part of any web strategy. Optimisation techniques involve helping search engines to accurately read and index the information on your site and deliver it to potential users through search results. The best techniques do this while with no impact on the user’s experience of the site. Here’s a review of the first steps on any SEO journey.

1. Site Copy

Copy has a direct impact on search engine optimisation as it provides the crawlers with meaningful semantic information about the site. The book content of any publishing site will contain excellent copy but marketing and home page material should be carefully considered as this is often where crawlers, users and off-site links find themselves first. The number of keywords per site should be limited to three or four and these should be added to the content in such a way that the content remains natural and readable.

Particular attention should be paid to drafting text for hyperlinks. This is because the words that point to a particular page are heavily weighted by Google when determining keywords for that particular page. Never use phrases like “Click here for our contact form” (for example); instead use words that describe the page you’re linking to by thinking of what a user would search for if they were looking for that page. In our example this might be “Contact us now using our contact form“.

2. Incoming Links

Google rates a pages relevance using an algorithm called PageRank which is calculated based on the number and relevancy of links pointing to the site. The concept is that each link represents a vote of confidence for your site. But the votes are not equal, links from pages with a high PageRank are worth more. The PageRank of any site is shown on the Google Toolbar, which you can download from Google. Wikipedia have a good explanation of the PageRank alogorithm.

3. Google Webmaster tools

Google Webmaster Tools offers a comprehensive selection of tools for configuring a site for improved search results on Google. The main offering is the ability to submit an XML sitemap that improves the crawl across the site making it easier to control what pages are being indexed. The use of XML sitemaps will improve discoverability of the content for any site. In addition to this, is the ability to see when crawls have taken place and when they are next scheduled. This is of particular importance on each content update to ensure that the most recent updates have been picked up. Google Webmaster Tools also provides:

A top search queries feature, where information about user search queries that have returned pages from your site are shown.
An interface for quickly finding all links to a site, allowing incoming links to be tracked.
Keywords and their frequency within the site.
Internal links.

4. Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers further integration with Google search as the script that enables the tracking of the site provides constant activity feedback back to Google. Google Analytics should be used to determine where users are coming from and where users are landing. This information in itself will not help search ranking and discoverability, but it will provide metrics with which to measure the progress of any search engine optimisation activity. There are other analytics packages, such as Yahoo! Web Analytics (which provides real-time statistics), but Google Analytics has been recommended as it is the leading search provider and integrates well with other Google tools.

4. URL structure

Have a look at many complex publishing sites and you might notice that there are no PageRanks on many of the deeper linked pages within the sites. This is most likely due to Google’s crawlers not reading complex page URLs as these pages are often less meaningfully marked up and are the result of a a query. For more details you can read Google’s explanation of this behaviour.

Many sites can benefit from an overhaul of the URL structure to provide more meaningful and less complex URL structure. Care needs to be be taken in making sure that the original links are still operable and their appearance in search engine results will diminish over time.

5. Error pages

If the user requests an unknown page, return a friendly error message and use the correct HTTP status code. This might sound obvious, but it’s a surprisingly common mistake on publisher platforms. If you don’t return the correct error code (for example “404 Not Found”) then Google will cache dead or bad links on your site, leading to less than optimal search experience for your users. Similarly, link resolution services such as CrossRef can only quality check your DOI metadata if the HTTP codes are used correctly.