Between this blog and work, I'm in a position where I really need to figure out how to handle the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for a website.  I'll probably be posting a lot about SEO and analytics in the coming months, but first I want to summarize what I've learned so far with this site.

First, I should say that nothing I'm mentioning here is rocket science.  You could type  "SEO advice" into Google and see all of these things in big bold letters, but I'm confirming them through my own experience.

The reason I started this blog was to control my web presence.  "Tyler King" is a pretty common name so I knew I had my work cut out for me.  My main goal was to get to the #1 result on Google if you search for "Tyler King".  I made my way from nothing to the #2 result in about a month and I think it's just a matter or time before I'm #1.  I now realize that getting to #1 is just the tip of the iceberg.

Anyway, here are some lessons I've learned so far:

Google can't read images

This is incredibly obvious, but I still made this mistake.  The homepage for my site only had the four images linking to my blog, portfolio, bio and resume.  There was no text anywhere which is fine for humans reading  the site (because the images had text in them) but Google came to my site and it couldn't figure out what was going on.  Any text that someone might search for should be in the html, not just in images.

Change your titles

This site originally had the same title (the text you see in your start bar when viewing one of these pages) which was "TylerKing.net".  Because of this, Google though all my pages were about the same thing.  By changing the titles based on the content on the page, I can prioritize which terms are important for which pages on my site.

Tags Matter

In HTML, the H1 tag is used to identify the main title of a page.  I was using other tags for all my text and styling it to look like a title.  For some reason Google just wasn't indexing my pages the way I wanted so I started using H1 tags and in a couple of days, my Google page rank was much higher.  Search engines can't guess what you're thinking, so it's important to use the old standards sometimes.

Link to everything

Many links on my site actually use javascript to navigate to a new page.  Google isn't good at following javascript links which resulted in Google only indexing the first page of my blog (5 posts).  As soon as I added the archives to the sidebar (which use real, legit HTML links) the problem was solved.

Change your content regularly

I always heard that search engines love indexing new content.  If my blog's homepage looks different to google every time it crawls my site, that makes it seem like my site is active and relevant.  The more posts I write, the more fun google can have indexing everything.

Get started now!

Search engines rank sites higher if they've been around longer.  There was a period of time where my site slowly rose in the ranks without me having actually done anything worthwhile.  Google trusts sites more if they have a longer history.  So if you're thinking about making a site, get started now even if you don't need it now.  SEO doesn't happen overnight.

Webmaster Tools rock

Google offers something called "Webmaster Tools".  I dismissed this for a while because I thought it was made to help people that couldn't manage sites by themselves.  It turns out that these tools tell you all kinds of cool stuff.  Did you know that a large percentage of the people that see my site as a result in Google used the search terms "Why is Tyler King gay".  Seriously.  Dozens of people searched for that.  Seriously.

Sitemaps aren't just for humans

Another thing Google Webmaster Tools lets you do is submit a specially formatted sitemap so that Google knows exactly where they can find all your pages.  That way the crawlers don't have to find all your pages on their own.

Well that's all for now.  I just set up better analytics tools at work so the SEO blitz begins this week.  I'm sure I'll have plenty of fun things to write about.