This article is for clients who have engaged SEO consultants and Web coders who are not yet up to speed on modern coding techniques.

Right now, writing decent code for Web sites is easier than it’s ever been. Modern best practices have made the HTML behind Web pages shorter and more sensibly structured. This makes it easier for search engines to parse the content of your site correctly—and humans have an easier time too.

In truth, HTML was never difficult to master. Monkeys have been trained to write HTML. Recently, in fact, Scientific American reported on a tribe of Bonobo chimps who have learned to code Web pages. The findings? In timed code-offs, the Bonobo outperformed DreamWeaver on every metric. Even better, when fed a mixed diet of fresh fruit and SEO consultants, they wrote leaner HTML than 9 in 10 human developers. You can’t argue with the good folks at Scientific American.

SEO consultants are like the Bonobo’s slow, immoral cousin. They can’t get real jobs so they use the smoke and mirrors to make clients think maximizing search engine friendliness is a complex art. It’s not. Time and time again, I’ve read their “reports” (forwarded to me by suspicious clients) and been horrified by the useless rubbish they contain.

In fairness, there are straight-shooting SEO consultants—I’m speaking theoretically, of course, having never actually met one.

By the time you finish this article, you’ll be an SEO grand-master. More importantly, your site’s ranking will improve within days, without one red cent having gone to an SEO quack.

The following are all white-hat techniques; they’re good for the health of your site and will improve your Google Page Rank. For a discussion of black-hat techniques that can result in your site being demoted and even banned from Google and Yahoo! see the Black Hat SEO Blog.

All right, in approximate order of importance, here’s what you need to know…

1. Key phrases in your title tag

Single best thing you can do. Get your key phrases in that tag. Simple and powerful. Here’s a bad example…

Welcome to our home page.

Don’t waste precious characters on words like “welcome,” “home” and “page”. Provide useful meaning, based on whatever the page itself contains. Examples…

Best SEO Techniques, Search Engine Optimization Tips

John Smith – Family Doctor – New York City, Manhattan

2. Key phrases in h1, h2, h3

Under the hood, all Web pages are structured like legal documents: a title, followed by headings, sub-headings, and chunks of body text. This isn’t some arcane aesthetic whim. It’s meaning.

Heading level one

Some introductory text might go here.

Heading level two

You can have as many level two headings as you like. They are the main section headings in any document.

This is a level three heading

More text would go here.

More text would go here.

This is a level three heading

More text would go here.

More text would go here.

Here’s another level two heading

More text would go here.

More text would go here.

This is a level three heading

More text would go here.

More text would go here.

This is a level three heading

More text would go here.

More text would go here.

Search engines give far more weight to key phrases when they appear between heading tags. Write meaningful headings populated with your key phrases.

Obviously, this looks ugly and not at all like most Web pages. Nonetheless, this is how all Web content is formatted in HTML. The visual presentation of Web pages is a separate matter, controlled independently via CSS. So you can relax: the above plain list of headings and content can be styled to look however you please.

Further Reading—a primer on h-tags and some associated issues.

Warning—use only a single h1 heading on your page. Google treats the h1 tag as the most important piece of text after the title tag—and will penalize you heavily if you inadvertently try to game their spider.

3. Key phrases used in in-bound links

In-bound links are links on other sites; the links on other sites that bring people to your site. The exact words that are linked are used by Google to determine the relevance of your site. For example, a link that looks like this…

For a list of doctors in Manhattan, click here.

…carries some weight, but not nearly as much weight as…

Click here for a list of doctors in Manhattan.

Mostly, you don’t have any say over the words somebody uses to define a link to your site. If you do have any control over what words are linked, exert that control, baby—exert!

4. Key phrases further up the page

Not the page as it displays in your browser—the raw HTML. Search engines give more weight to key phrases when they appear early in the HTML of your page.

For example, with some clever HTML and CSS it’s possible to place semantically deficient navigation lists after your key-phrase-rich body content.

5. Web standards compliant code, rather than tables-for-layout rot

Clients—Talk to your Web developers about modern Web standards. Ask for table-free layouts. Demand the elimination of font tags and inline styles. Watch for a glassy, terrified expression.

Designers—Still using tables for layout and font tags for styling text? Maybe you’ve outsourced some styling to CSS but haven’t yet climbed the grand edifice of CSS-for-Layouts. Well, it’s time to poop. Honestly, reach out and touch that CSS nerd you know. Ask him about floats and clearing divs. In a week or two, you’ll be up in that nasty old edifice’s face. You’ll feel better, you’ll lose weight, and you’ll never go back. Seriously. Friends don’t let friends table their layouts.

6. Key phrases peppered throughout your p tags

They carry some weight and help a little. No harm done.

7. Key phrases in link title tags and image alt tags

Not crucial but stick ’em in, anyway. Everything helps.

Important subtleties…

8. The keyword meta tag is worthless

Yeah, yeah, I use it in the HTML of my own site but only for historical/habitual reasons—and MSN which, at the time of writing, is the only engine dumb enough to give credence to the keywords meta tag. Quite sensibly (because the tag was so abused by keyword spammers) all other engines ignore it. Of course, compiling a list of key words and phrases has to happen. From there, how hard is it to throw in a meta tag that might help some poor dunce who thinks MSN is the happening spot?

On the other hand, the description meta tag is still alive and kicking. It won’t improve your page ranking but the text you include there is what Google and other engines will display under the clickable link on a search results page. Keep it short. Ten words. Fifteen words at a stretch.

9. Single keywords are not enough – phrases rule

People almost never search using single words. Mostly, they use a combination of two or three words. For example, nobody searches for just “doctors”. They search for “doctors manhattan” or “doctors new york city”. These are the kinds of phrases to pepper throughout your site as described above.

The final word

Always keep this one word at the front of your mind: credibility. Make sure your pages supply useful content. It’s the only surefire way to draw true high-quality traffic.

Further reading