Be a white hat SEO for your intranet: it's good for accessibility

SEO means Search Engine Optimiser.

Some are white hats; some are black hats. Just like in the old Wild West! Which in fact is not such as bad metaphor for the internet and even some intranets!

The SEOs with white hats conduct legitimate optimising of web pages to make the site come up appropriately in the Search Engine Results Pages (also called SERPs)(Wikipedia).

The back hat SEOs implement tricks to appear high in the results pages even if the web site is not necessarily relevant. The range of tricks is astonishing (many infringe copyright) and when search engines detect them, the site is usually thrown out of their index database. Read about spamdexing (Wikipedia).

I learned a lot about this when working with ProvenceBeyond.com, web site run by my husband and online since 1995. With an average of 1.5 million pages read per month as of last year, and a Google page rank of 7, the site is one of the most popular for information about Provence, where we live. I became very interested in optimising web sites for search engines because of different ups and downs Beyond has had over the last few years, and in particular each time Google does a major algorithm change and we all go through another Google dance.

Back to intranets: I soon realised that (1) most of the techniques used by white hat SEOs were similar if not identical to the guidelines given by accessibility experts. The very things you do to make your web site more search-engine friendly also make it more accessible. (2) These guidelines can also be applied to intranets.

Some examples off the top of my head:

• The pages should be focused on a single topic or single aspect of a topic so that they are relevant to specific search words. This makes them more relevant for users when they show up in the results page.
• Every page should have a unique, relevant title in the html coding and on the page itself
• Meta data for each page should be chosen carefully, be specific and fairly limited
• The meta data description should be unique, limited and relevant. This is what is often shown in the search engine results and provides the primary clues to the reader about your content.
• These descriptions should be short and focused, as the SERP (search engine results page) will only show a pre-defined number of characters or lines.
• Styles should include "title", "heading 1, "heading 2" and so on so that relationships and relative importance of blocks of text on the page are clear
• Links should be short text that make explicit what you'll get when you click ("large photo of building site" and not "see large photo")

You can imagine the improvement in the SERPs in your intranet, if the intranet pages followed these guidelines. I've seen so many results pages where the top results all look the same.
Of course, in an intranet context, the people responsible for indexing need to be in a "Google frame of mind". I mean they need to ensure that intranet sites that change often are indexed often. Google offers webmasters a tool (site maps) that let you tell Google how often to index your site.
I'm not a technical expert, and wonder if enterprise search engine solutions offer something similar?
Can someone answer this question?....

Technorati Tags: information architecture, intranet