Little Miss Muffet's No Fear SEO Tips

The nursery rhyme goes:

"Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet. Eating her curds and whey, Along came a spider, Who sat down beside her. And frightened Miss Muffet away"

In the marketing world, "spiders" are Google's algorithms that connect what someone is searching for with what is available from all of the millions upon millions of websites on the internet. When a word or term is "Googled"(I believe Google is a verb!) the spiders "crawl the web" with the number one goal of presenting the most relevant results. A marketer's number one goal is to be found within the top of those search results.

Have no fear, the modern Little Miss Muffet is armed with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knowledge when Google's spiders come to crawl her website. Here are a few tips to get you on your "whey":


Spiders are blind.
Google's spiders can not see images or video, so you need to be as descriptive as you can with file names, tags, Alt tags, video descriptions, image captions...basically, use every opportunity available within your content management system or whatever platform you are using to describe the content so that it does not get overlooked in searches.

Spiders are hungry and a little bit dumb.
In order to "feed" the spiders, websites should have a few things in place that tell Google "this is what THIS PAGE is about" - notice I emphasized THIS PAGE - Every page on a website is different, or at least it should be, so the page title, H1 Tags, and meta description need to be unique. If there are multiple pages, with the same description, the spiders will get confused. Don't confuse the spiders!

Spiders like it hot, smokin' hot!
Consider external links (hyperlinks from other websites that link to content on your website) as smoke signals to Google's spiders, when people are searching for a specific subject- Google will go to the place that has the most smoke first. The more smoke you generate via external links to your site from reputable sources, the hotter your prospects will be once they find you!

Want to learn more about SEO? Try Search Engine Land's Guide to "What is SEO?"

Please feel free to share your nibbles of spider food (AKA SEO tips) in the comments section below.