Welcome to the November edition of ZooNews, the monthly missive provided by Montreal Web design company Zoonini Web Services.

Earlier this month, my colleague Charlotte Riley and I spoke to a group of entrepreneurs about the key factors in search engine optimization (SEO), which she defines as "the art of creating a Web site (or altering an existing one) so that it does well in the organic (unpaid) listings of a search engine when someone searches for a specific phrase related to the site."

Charlotte and I often collaborate on site remakes and brand-new sites where the three critical elements of SEO are put into action. That key trio consists of: content, design and linking strategies. This month I will shine the spotlight on content.

"Content is King." What does that oft-repeated Web cliché actually mean? For one thing, it means that if your site is to succeed in search engine results – and draw in human visitors, your ultimate audience – you must never forget that content is the primary force that will captivate (or drive away) potential customers.

This weekend, as I made the rounds of my favourite neighbourhood grocery store Supermarché Akhavan, it dawned on me that Web sites are very much like supermarkets. In both cases, the content – whether Web content or store-shelf content – must always be fresh to ensure a return visit. Whether it's a visit to Akhavan or CBC.ca, when there's always something new and intriguing to check out, I'm sure to keep coming back.

And just as supermarket customers demand freshness in their food, search engines also like to see regular site updates, rather than stale content that stays the same month after month. This is one reason why sites with a blog tend to help a site's search engine ranking.

Your content should also be abundant – there should be plenty for visitors to sink their teeth into once they've reached your site – just think how shelves overflowing with an assortment of fresh veggies are always much more appealing than a sparse, sad arrangement of four or five onions.

But no matter how many different types of information (or groceries) are on offer, staples must always be available. Whether it's milk and eggs or a company's contact information, it must be a no-brainer that visitors will be able to find the basics they need.

One term that always crops up in discussions of SEO is keywords: the combination of words (usually two-, three- or four-word combinations) that searchers plug into a search engine to find your company. Think of it like this: the same way no one will ever find a box of Earl Grey tea among the rows and rows of teas unless it is labelled "Earl Grey," no one will ever find your site selling organic chocolate cookies unless you've used the phrase "organic chocolate cookies" throughout your site.

Not only do your keywords need to be incorporated into your Web site copy in a natural-sounding way (something Charlotte Riley has refined to a high art!), but they also should be used within the less obvious parts of your site, including the page title – the words that show up in the browser's title bar – and other HTML code, much of which is only accessed "behind the scenes" by the search engine robots.

Finally, the way you present your content is also important. Make sure a grammar-and-spelling guru proofreads your site before you go live. Not only will you look silly with "orgnic chocolte" misspelled throughout, your site is unlikely to turn up in search engine results for those keywords!

Next month we'll delve into the second key SEO element, optimized design.

Keyword Density sounds like a test you might undergo if you're not getting enough calcium. In the context of SEO, however, it refers to the percentage of "indexable text" that consists of your targeted keywords. For example, if your site's homepage uses the phrase "organic chocolate cookies" twice within a total of 100 words, then the keyword density for that phrase would be 6%. Free keyword density analyzers such as this one let you peek at your competitors' sites to see how they compare to your own.

Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.

This fall, tech company Coradiant launched a bilingual, all-Canadian site at Coradiant.ca. Our task was to create a site with the same look-and-feel as their international dot-com brand, which we did by using the same colour scheme and Flash piece as the main site. Careful adaptation of the existing English text into French, by a professional translator and editor, was key to ensuring that the original technology lingo stayed true to its original meaning.

Recently, someone passed along an email that encouraged me to type "failure" into Google and look at the top result: a White House biography of none other than George W. Bush. The message encouraged visitors to check out this anomaly soon, before someone at Google "fixes" it. What the original author of this missive didn't realize is that this is no mistake, but a perfect example of a Google bomb – a phenomenon where zillions of people decide to link certain words to a specific Web page.

This particular Google bomb originated back in 2003, when scads of anti-Bush bloggers linked the phrase "miserable failure" to the official presidential bio. The full story is documented at Snopes, an indispensable repository of urban-legend lore.

À la prochaine,

kp
aka Kathryn Presner