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I attended the search engine optimization session by Andreas Prokoph, Lead architect for search in Portal and WCM, at the excellent web experience conference in Orlando.  It was very informative on how search engines work and what doesn’t work.  Here are some of the key messages of interest from the session.

How does a high quality Internet search engine like Google really work?

• You may not be at the top of search results even though you have keywords, meta-data, good URLs, etc
• Paid results can get you to the top but it is very expensive

Understanding search engine optimization (SEO) means different things:

• Some pages are for one reason and are unique and will get ranked high for very specific searches
• Other queries qualify millions of pages.  If you have equal ranks of 99.2%, which one gets ranked first?
• If you were Google, whom would you ask / which is better?
  • Website owner
  • Internet community
  • Other sources, e.g. social bookmarking, what people in Facebook are saying, etc
•  What does not work for SEO
  • Exploiting meta-data – stuffing keywords and descriptions with unrelated keywords
  • Internal linking amongst the web pages – “Internal page rank”
  • Submitting page references to various feed consumers, etc
  • ‘Alt tag’ stuffing
  • “search engine friendly URLs” – adding keywords in a URL doesn’t help
• Usage of metadata by Google
  • Title and description are important because of a first impression a user gets visually
  • Title and description don’t actually contribute to relevance in search results
• What is SEO all about – SEO deals with the following challenges
  • Crawlability – search engine crawler must be able to access and process content
    • Redirect only if you really have to – never redirect a crawler
    • The crawler needs to get the same info a user gets
    • Do not use JavaScript to generate content or URLs – a content cannot crawl this
    • Have good navigation – crawlers like site-maps
  • Findability – users should be able to find info relevant to the query on the site
  • Relevance – often primary and sol focus of webmasters
  • How do you help findability and relevance?
    • Not too little, not too much info on a web page
    • Avoid flash and images that convey content and purpose – crawlers cannot crawl it
    • Focus first on what you want to tell users and customers
    • Think about keywords users (not you) might use
    • Provide appropriate title and description information

Portal V7 with FixPack 1 can deliver

• Updated content rendering portlet
• Publish description and title derived from rendered content
• Publish any other meta-data as well

What else can you do to improve page ranks?

• Honestly, not much
• You can seek relationships wiht trusted web sites and share info, such as exchanging links
• Register your site with Yahoo!
• Make web pages easy to cross-link
  • Considery user friendly URLs for user’s to pick up and use on their websites
• Think of exploiting new technoligies and informaiton platforms
  • Upload a video on YouTube demonstrating your product
  • Facebook communities, etc
• In the end, if the page is good, others will refer to it helping your relevance