This article contains details on how I built my personal website over the last 6 months with some examples of how my site has fared in Google search results. SEO of course stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and the lazy human is basically me (and perhaps you). You see, SEO is a minor concern to me in many ways, however I admit to being fascinated by how I “stack up” in the eyes of the search engine.

Before going much further have you read Derek Powazek’s article “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists”? If you’re short on time, go read his article instead of this one because there’s not a whole lot I can add.

You might be too lazy to read Derek’s article right now. I’ll present two of his main points regarding SEO: 1.)”The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.“. 2.) Regarding how to get traffic to your website : “Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”

So where do you find the good advice mentioned in the first point? Just go to the source. Google publishes a starter guide to SEO. It’s a 20 page pdf that contains 99% of what you need to know. These strategies are “the secrets”, of which there are none. The rest of this post talks about some of the ways I used these strategies.

Reaping the seo benefits of thoughtful site design

Something interesting has happened with my site and the Google results for it and I’d like to tell you about it. Below there is a form field with the words “designer educator writer” filled in. This is hooked up to Google. Go ahead and press “Search” and then come back (Please!).

As of January 2010 when I wrote this, the top result of the search will bring up my website. (Here’s a screenshot in case things have changed!)

I thought this was pretty cool but I’m calling this the lazy guide because I had no intent of getting this spot. It was a natural byproduct of the steps I took while developing my site. Below are some of the strategies you can use for yours:

• Define your niche.. The three words “designer”, “educator” and “writer” are keywords. Submitted individually they return generic results on Google. However when submitted together they define a relatively small subset: one that happens to define me and what I do. That was a built-in advantage, there isn’t a whole lot of competition in my field apparently! So spend some time defining how you are different from everyone else out there on the Web.
• Build your site right.. There are a lot of foundational HTML and CSS techniques that I used while building my site. I’m not going to get into the details here, but that’s because these techniques are becoming increasingly well known, they include things such as proper use of heading tags, not using images for text, etc. There are a few things that stand out about the way I designed the site, however.

1. Make your site navigation relevant. The navigation of my site reflects the keywords. This seems so obvious that I feel silly writing it down, but content that relates to design is in the “Designer” section, content that relates to books I have worked on is in the “Writer” section and so on. This probably makes Google happy because the navigation is not only relevant to the content on the page but is hyperlinked text repeated dozens of times throughout the site.
2. Use page titles wisely. My page titles are very specific and reflect the organization of my site. Page titles on your website really matter. (We’re talking about the <title> tag here). I use a simple template on each page: [My name], [the section of the site] and [a few key words relating to the content]. As an example, the page title for the writer section is  “Jeremy Osborn: Writer (Adobe Classroom in a Book, Digital Classroom Dreamweaver CS4)”. Google likes title tags because they are genuinely useful. When someone bookmarks a page in their browser or a service like Delicious, the title tag info is what gets saved. Be sure to keep usability in mind though, a page title that is too long might get cut off.

• Write for the web A great resource on how to create content for the web is Kristina Halvorson’s article The Discipline of Content Strategy . Go read it.
• Get linked. After all the hard work that has taxed your lazy self, it’s time to put other people to work. The web is a popularity contest and when people link to your site you get more popular in Google’s view. Pretty much everyone knows this and there is an entire industry that tries to abuse this fact. However, links to your website seem to have more weight when they are relevant. So although I like it when someone writes in their blog “Jeremy Osborn is a pretty awesome dude. Go check out his website.” I like it a lot better when the hyperlinked text is relevant: “Jeremy Osborn is an amazing educator, a real-life hero if there ever was one.” You can’t necessarily control how other people link to you, only suggest it. Just remember, there’s a fine line between an honest and organic link to your site and one that is obviously manufactured.
  
  I want to point out that the number of incoming links to my site is actually extremely small, it’s the one place where I’m the most lazy. I could probably shore up my Google ranking if I took some time to solicit more incoming links from friends/colleagues.
• Leverage Social Media In my opinion, the one place where you can push limits are on your own profile pages for the social media sites: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Wherever I have a public profile online I make sure that any tagline is consistent with my “designer, educator, writer” theme. These sites are like free currency, there is value in their popularity and you still get to maintain your SEO integrity as long as you are up front with the fact you are using them for self-promotion.

You may be asking at this point why this qualifies as “lazy”, because this might sound like a bit of work. Remember that it was not a goal of mine to claim the #1 result for “designer, educator, writer”. My goal was to define myself in a unique way and then be consistent about it. That’s the hard part. Do that and focus on making great things rather than spending time and energy on SEO tricks.