Optimisation.
It goes without saying that you’re publishing content for it to be seen. Why else would you go to all that trouble? But just publishing content is unlikely to have it noticed, it’s just another drop in the ocean. Optimising for search can help you get some attention.
Search engines.
A search box may on the face of it appear to be just a search box, but it’s not always searching the same places. It’s important to understand the differences and how to present your content for people who happen to be searching within and outside your website.
External search
External search uses engines to look through the entire internet to find relevant content based on the search terms used. Millions of webpages are checked from millions of websites with the best suiting filtered down to a set of results pages. Naturally, because of this, it's harder to get your content to the top of the search results page.Internal search
Internal search uses an engine to look through a specific website, or web domain, for relevant content contained only within this one website. Don't be confused, the household-name services (Google, Bing, Ask) can be used to power search for individual websites, although others are available.
Tagging.
To be found amongst the sea of information published on the internet, your content needs to be identified. Just as us humans have bona fide paperwork; a birth certificate, passport or driver’s license, so too has content.
Search engines use the same uniformed approach to recognise and approve authenticity. Showing a store reward card wouldn’t be accepted by the authorities, and the equivalent goes for the machines.
Page title
Every webpage has a title. Not the headline at the top of the copy, but the text that appears at the top of the browser window. This should be the content's full name; equivalent of a person's first, middle and last names. It describes exactly what's on the page.Remember, a page can be discovered using either an internal or external search. So it's best to not assume anything and write a title as if this is the first time a person is reading any of your content.
Many CMSs use a page's headline as the page title. This can be useful on occasions, but they are two distinctly different things that have different purposes. It's best to have the option to manually override this setting so you can input separate page titles and content headlines as and when you need to.
Page description
Having typed a few search terms or question into a search engine, a page of results is delivered. Often thousands of pages are presented, all claiming to be your answer. The engine has done it's best to filter, but now it's over to you to pick the best. While it's often the top of the list, that isn't always the case.Pages can be judged and ranked by reading the short description that appears under the page title. It often contains one or more of the keywords you typed, but is written in a sentence, rather than a rabbling string or words. Descriptions give you another opportunity for you to sell yourself. Make the most of it.
Keywords
Ask someone to tell you a little about themselves. They'd probably tell you about their job, marital status, town of birth, current location, offspring, siblings and family; political persuasion and hobbies. From this, we instantly get a sense of who they are.Content is no different. It too has a similar identity that needs to be explained. The only difference being, it can't tell you about itself, it relies on search engines to do it for you. It uses a series of key words to give a rounded picture of who it is and what it does.
To add keywords to your content, use a collection of nouns and adjectives to describe it. To some extent it's a guessing game, but ask yourself, 'what questions would someone ask where this content is a suitable answer?'
Headlines, headers & body text
We've already learnt the page title is different from the page headline. However, it too is analyzed when judging a page. An engine will rank the page based on how many of the keywords searched for appear in the headline. The more that do, the better it ranks.This is also true for sub-headers that appear amongst the body of the page, and the body text itself. However be warned, this isn't a signal to cram keywords in at all costs. Where content is found to be 'loaded' with false keywords, it will be black-listed and not ranked at all. So don't cheat!
Promotion.
If you’ve optimised your content for search, will it always be found? Ah, well, not necessarily. Your content is competing against loads of others for people’s attention. Keywording it is just the bear minimum needed. The fact is, just because you’ve published it, it doesn’t mean it’s any good.
Search engines now use other means to rank similar content. Each page may contain the same keywords, headlines and other optimisation, but how does a machine know which is better than another? By using our behaviour to judge, that’s how.
