Soft­ware Design Guru…? In the about sec­tion I con­veyed a cer­tain ambi­tion fit­ting for a per­son want­ing to be the next a design guru. In line with a cur­rent Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) prank called “the coolest guy on the planet” I’ll divulge a par­tic­u­lar tac­tic on becom­ing a soft­ware design guru, or any other per­son for that mater, on Google. Because, as renowned SEO expert Brad Fal­lon once said, if Google says your a soft­ware design guru with a #1 search engine results page (SERP) rank­ing, you’ve got to be.

The Soft­ware Design Guru search for #1

I believe that the inter­net will drive all retail mar­kets before we’ve reach 2020. That means that SEO will become a sta­ple of a soft­ware design, par­tic­u­larly because web appli­ca­tions will be the dom­i­nat­ing force when it comes to soft­ware.  So becom­ing a soft­ware design guru means that you should at least have a basic under­stand­ing of SEO tac­tics. You have to know how to incor­po­rate SEO into your design espe­cially if you design for the web. Cer­tainly call­ing your­self a soft­ware design guru will not be directly related to SEO in a soft­ware design, but who knows?

In a future post I want to visu­ally rep­re­sent some tried and true SEO tac­tics but for know I’ll use no more than clas­sic, mostly “on page” SEO fac­tors to bom­bard myself as the next soft­ware design guru. And it’s always nice to have a clean SEO for dum­mies sum­mary for those only being inter­ested. So here’s the list which should make me the next soft­ware design guru accord­ing to Google.

Tac­tic #1: the Title Tags

SEO’s  hall­mark is the key­word or key phrase. The word or string of words denot­ing what you want to rank highly for. In my case it’ll obvi­ously be “soft­ware design guru”. As Google’s soft­ware “crawls” your web page it looks for indica­tive infor­ma­tion to store and if I sprin­kle “soft­ware design guru” enough times, not too many I might add there, but enough times, then this page has got to have some­thing to do with that word. One such obvi­ous place to put a key phrase is the title tag, a com­monly used so-called “on page fac­tor”. And I’ve done just such a thing. I decided to use the exact key phrase “soft­ware design guru” and not some­thing like “SEO tac­tics: becom­ing the next soft­ware design guru” because it sup­pos­edly does not water down the strength of the par­tic­u­lar key phrase. So for tac­tic #1 we’ve got the title tag nailed. But the per­cep­tive reader will already have noticed that the first H2 tag has the key phrase “soft­ware design guru” in it.

Stak­ing Out the Competition

An extremely impor­tant part of SEO is stak­ing out the com­pe­ti­tion and there’s a spe­cific Google com­mand which relates to the poten­tial strength of your title tag. This com­mand is called “allinti­tle” and what it does is it looks for every instance Google can find the cho­sen keyphrase in their index. So sup­pos­edly allintitle:“software design guru” should come up with every page which has “soft­ware design guru” in that exact order. Now I say sup­pos­edly because these com­mands, allinti­tle not being one of a kind, very often result in Google telling you your com­puter has been taken over by mal­ware and you should check it out or some­thing. Because of it’s power it would be extremely easy to be mis­used by bots there­fore you’re either asked to captcha your way through the mes­sage, you just get the mes­sage or you’re ignored entirely and Google just sits there as if noth­ing hap­pened and you’ve never entered the com­mand in the first place (some­thing Google’s Chrome does with­out a sec­ond thought).

Allinti­tle being one of the more sophis­ti­cated com­mands to stake out the com­pe­ti­tion on spe­cific key­words directly with a search engine, other sim­ple to use com­mands just need you to put quotes around your search phrase. Where a sim­ple soft­ware design guru comes up with any page that has any com­bi­na­tion of these words on it, “soft­ware design guru” (with quotes) says you’re only inter­ested in pages hav­ing these exact three words in them. For soft­ware design guru that means I’m up against a stag­ger­ing 54.300 other pages. Now you might say that try­ing to become num­ber one or even num­ber ten for the soft­ware design guru keyphrase is try­ing to win a marathon as an obese per­son after shoot­ing your­self in both legs: it can be done but it will be bloody to say the least. That would be true if not for the fol­low­ing reasons:

• 99.99% does not opti­mize their web page. Every­body knows that try­ing to find some­thing on the inter­net can be a lit­tle dis­heart­en­ing at times, if not for the sole rea­son there’s a lot of garbage out. Every­body can cre­ate his or her own web­site so that’s what every­body does. That cer­tainly doesn’t mean that every­body max­i­mizes their page with respect to SEO and very few actu­ally do. As with every­thing else, SEO takes blood, sweat, tears and strength of char­ac­ter to pull off.
• Hav­ing 54.300 other pages with some com­bi­na­tion of soft­ware design guru in them doesn’t mean those pages are all about soft­ware design gurus. A whole bunch of them will be about “soft­ware” and “design” and “soft­ware design”, three highly com­pet­i­tive key phrases. Only a frac­tion of those pages will specif­i­cally tar­get “soft­ware design guru” and a frac­tion of that frac­tion will opti­mize their web page for this exact key­word. To be more exact, a quick peek in Google’s Traf­fic Esti­ma­tor reveals that nobody is search­ing for soft­ware design guru, mak­ing  it the eas­i­est tar­get I could’ve ever cho­sen. On the other hand, if I ever had the intel­li­gent notion of try­ing to make money from that key phrase I knew from the begin­ning I’d been sorely mistaken.
• As already men­tioned in the above para­graph, there’s lit­tle to no traf­fic at all for soft­ware design guru in par­tic­u­lar, mak­ing it the worst keyphrase I could have cho­sen to mon­e­tize. But that doesn’t mat­ter here. This is about dri­ving some­thing home and from my per­spec­tive, being called a “soft­ware design guru” is to me a very good thing. I know for cer­tain that there have been a lot of peo­ple spend­ing hours and hours rank­ing for “the coolest guy on the planet”. Remem­ber, try­ing to mon­e­tize a cer­tain page can be just one of many goals you set for yourself.

Tac­tic #2: body copy

The sec­ond on page fac­tor: body copy. By now you might just real­ize that I’ve sprin­kled no other key­word than the exact “soft­ware design guru” in the body copy of this post. As every­one SEO expert will tell you, it has to appear nat­u­rally. Just copy­ing and past­ing a par­tic­u­lar key­word a thou­sand times on the same page will not work. That tac­tic is just not done and might very pos­si­bly even hurt your rank­ings by being excluded, banned, put in “the sand­box” or by hav­ing some other penalty. Being a soft­ware design guru with respect to SEO is to know your busi­ness and not to resort to child’s play when it comes to opti­miz­ing your web­site for a cer­tain key­word. On page fac­tors are the most easy and the least strong ele­ments of SEO, so we will have to take it a step fur­ther than just ran­domly putting “soft­ware design guru” in places where it’ll look nat­ural to the reader.

Tac­tic #3: the meta description

The meta descrip­tion of your page is the descrip­tion of the page. That same descrip­tion will come up in a Google SERP and will be vis­i­ble to web surfers. If you don’t fill in your own descrip­tion Google will just take a piece of con­tent from your page, prob­a­bly the first para­graph and show that. So it’s not only good prac­tice to think about some descrip­tion for a par­tic­u­lar page but make it search engine friendly, mean­ing opti­miz­ing it for a par­tic­u­lar key phrase. Word­Press’ plu­gin All In One SEO Pack has built in func­tion­al­ity to do just that besides mak­ing a cus­tom title tag that could dif­fer from the one above this post. So my descrip­tion of this page will read some­thing like:

Soft­ware Design Guru: An SEO for Dum­mies Experiment

How to rank #1 as a Soft­ware Design Guru, become a Soft­ware Design Guru accord­ing to Google, read about sim­ple, easy to use SEO tac­tics for dummies

Tac­tic #4: back­ward links

One of the main tac­tics of becom­ing any­thing on the web, let alone a soft­ware design guru, is to get back­ward links. Back­ward links are:

• Links from other pages to your web page
• seri­ous rank boost­ers when com­ing from an estab­lished web page, “estab­lished” mean­ing web pages which have a lot of back­ward links themselves
• seri­ous rank boost­ers when the inbound links have the par­tic­u­lar key phrase you’re opti­miz­ing for in the link text, e.g. a link called “soft­ware design guru”. One link called “soft­ware design guru” com­ing from Apple, CNN, Microsoft, Adobe will be enough to throw you sky-high on the pages.
• seri­ous rank boost­ers if the page they’re com­ing from has a solid “pager­ank”. Some­thing I do not wish to delve in to0 deep because, to be hon­est, pager­ank is made up of so many unre­solved fac­tors that it would be hubris for me to try to explain what it means

I don’t have any pager­ank, this web­site is brand new, I don’t have any back­ward links, so this of page fac­tor will be dif­fi­cult for me to attain unless I bend the rules a bit and make it on page. Mean­ing I refer to my own page within this site or other sites I own, which is what I did. Word­Press, from a stand­point of on page back­ward links, if I may coin that phrase, is excel­lent for doing just that. So why don’t I put a link depict­ing me as the next “soft­ware design guru” in the lit­tle about piece in the footer.

Since I have a cus­tom tem­plate this will take a lit­tle hand-coding, but the fol­low­ing did the trick:

About JvS

Start­ing his career as a free­lance illus­tra­tor Johan van Sei­jen has worked for sev­eral inter­na­tional mag­a­zines such as Cos­mopoli­tan, Avant­garde and Glam­our. He has a degree in Infor­ma­tional Sci­ences from the Uni­ver­sity of Ams­ter­dam and is cur­rently work­ing as a senior soft­ware designer and require­ment engi­neer for Dex­els, a small soft­ware com­pany. Hav­ing the audac­ity to become the next soft­ware design guru, exper­tise gained in both fields is employed in an unortho­dox way to ful­fil cus­tomer needs in this hec­tic IT sector.

Besides this sim­ple trick, call­ing the post “soft­ware design guru” will have the added ben­e­fit of show­ing the key phrase on a lot of dif­fer­ent pages. So there’s “soft­ware design guru” in “recent posts” which repeats itself with every footer instance. Actu­ally one of the things I’ve done wrong from a stand­point of soft­ware design­ing, or web design to be more exact, is that I haven’t included the Word­Press side­bar in my home­page, so I don’t have extra link­ing strength . From a SEO stand­point that’s a bad thing. I might fix that in the future.

Con­clud­ing Our “Soft­ware Design Guru” SEO for Dum­mies Experiment

To con­clude this lit­tle exper­i­ment we’ll have to wait a lit­tle while and see where we’ll actu­ally show up in the rank­ings for “soft­ware design guru”. This post has been a very brief intro­duc­tion with some very easy things you could do to opti­mize your web pages. I’ll may return on the sub­ject and I’ll cer­tainly will if I’ve reached num­ber one.

Read how this story will con­tinue in our next post: SEO tips: Soft­ware Design Guru Update

Related posts:

1. SEO tips #1: Soft­ware Design­ers in Dire Straits
2. Soft­ware Design Prepa­ra­tion & Execution