The Art of SEO : Content Optimization (part 2)

2. CSS and Semantic Markup

CSS is commonly mentioned as a best practice for general web design and development, but its principles provide some indirect SEO benefits as well. Google used to recommend keeping pages smaller than 101 KB, and it used to be a common belief that there were benefits to implementing pages that were small in size. Now, however, search engines deny that code size is a factor at all, unless it is really extreme. Still, keeping file size low means faster load times, lower abandonment rates, and a higher probability of being fully read and more frequently linked to.

CSS can also help with another hotly debated issue: code to text ratio. Some SEO professionals swear that making the code to text ratio smaller (so there’s less code and more text) can help considerably on large websites with many thousands of pages. Your experience may vary, but since good CSS makes it easy, there’s no reason not to make it part of your standard operating procedure for web development. Use tableless CSS stored in external files, keep JavaScript calls external, and separate the content layer from the presentation layer as shown on CSS Zen Garden, a site that offers many user-contributed style sheets formatting the same HTML content.

Finally, CSS provides an easy means for “semantic” markup. For a primer, see Digital Web Magazine’s article, “Writing Semantic Markup” (http://www.digital-web.com/articles/writing_semantic_markup/). For SEO purposes, only a few primary tags apply, and the extent of microformats interpretation (using tags such as <author> or <address>) is less critical (the engines tend to sort out semantics largely on their own since so few web publishers participate in this coding fashion, but there is evidence that it helps with local search). Using CSS code to provide emphasis, to quote/reference, and to reduce the use of tables and other bloated HTML mechanisms for formatting, however, can make a positive difference.

3. Content Uniqueness and Depth

Few can debate the value the engines place on robust, unique, value-added content—Google in particular has had several rounds of kicking “low-quality-content” sites out of its indexes, and the other engines have followed suit.

The first critical designation to avoid is “thin content”—an insider phrase that (loosely) refers to content the engines do not feel contributes enough unique material to display a page competitively in the search results. The criteria have never been officially listed, but many examples/discussions from engineers and search engine representatives would place the following on the list:

• Thirty to 50 unique words, forming unique, parsable sentences that other sites/pages do not have.

• Unique HTML text content, different from other pages on the site in more than just the replacement of key verbs and nouns (yes, this means all those sites that build the same page and just change the city and state names thinking it is “unique” are mistaken).

• Unique titles and meta description elements. If you can’t write unique meta descriptions, just exclude them. Similarly, algorithms can trip up pages and boot them from the index simply for having near-duplicate meta tags.

• Unique video/audio/image content. The engines have started getting smarter about identifying and indexing pages for vertical search that wouldn’t normally meet the “uniqueness” criteria.

Note:

By the way, you can often bypass these limitations if you have a good quantity of high-value external links pointing to the page in question (though this is very rarely scalable) or an extremely powerful, authoritative site (note how many one-sentence Wikipedia stub pages still rank).

The next criterion from the engines demands that websites “add value” to the content they publish, particularly if it comes from (wholly or partially) a secondary source.

3.1. A word of caution to affiliates

This word of caution most frequently applies to affiliate sites whose republishing of product descriptions, images, and so forth has come under search engine fire numerous times. In fact, it is best to anticipate manual evaluations here even if you’ve dodged the algorithmic sweep. The basic tenets are:

• Don’t simply republish something that’s found elsewhere on the Web unless your site adds substantive value to users, and don’t infringe on others’ copyrights.

• If you’re hosting affiliate content, expect to be judged more harshly than others, as affiliates in the SERPs are one of users’ top complaints about search engines.

• Small things such as a few comments, a clever sorting algorithm or automated tags, filtering, a line or two of text, simple mashups, or advertising do not constitute “substantive value.”

For some exemplary cases where websites fulfill these guidelines, check out the way sites such as CNET, Urbanspoon, and Metacritic take content/products/reviews from elsewhere, both aggregating and “adding value” for their users.

Last but not least, Google has provided a guideline to refrain from trying to place “search results in the search results.” For reference, look at the post from Google’s Matt Cutts, including the comments, at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/. Google’s stated feeling is that search results generally don’t “add value” for users, though others have made the argument that this is merely an anticompetitive move.

Sites can benefit from having their “search results” transformed into “more valuable” listings and category/subcategory landing pages. Sites that have done this have had great success recovering rankings and gaining traffic from Google.

In essence, you want to avoid the potential for your site pages being perceived, both by an engine’s algorithm and by human engineers and quality raters, as search results. Refrain from:

• Pages labeled in the title or headline as “search results” or “results”

• Pages that appear to offer a query-based list of links to “relevant” pages on the site without other content (add a short paragraph of text, an image, and formatting that make the “results” look like detailed descriptions/links instead)

• Pages whose URLs appear to carry search queries (e.g., ?q=miami+restaurants or ?search=Miami+restaurants versus /miami-restaurants)

• Pages with text such as “Results 1 through 10”