When you’re look­ing for help when faced with some tech­nol­o­gy-relat­ed ques­tion, how do you find assistance?

Maybe you ask a per­son if you’re at work. Per­haps you fire up the help with the prod­uct, if it’s avail­able. Maybe you vis­it the company’s web site and troll through the sup­port sec­tion, look­ing for the answer to your ques­tion. But increas­ing­ly, I sus­pect that more and more users are typ­ing the prob­lem they face into Google’s search field because more often than not, it pro­vides the most accu­rate and rel­e­vant results.

As a tech­ni­cal writer, if you’re post­ing con­tent online that can be searched by search engines, it may be worth bor­row­ing Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) tac­tics to make your con­tent easy to find on the Inter­net. Some back­ground: SEO is the process of improv­ing the vis­i­bil­i­ty of a web site using search results. So, for exam­ple, if you work as a tech­ni­cal writer in Seat­tle and some­one types the key­words “Seat­tle tech­ni­cal writer” into Google, ide­al­ly your web site is one of the first to dis­play in the results.

Now imag­ine that you gen­er­ate Web­Help for your com­pa­ny and it’s host­ed on a web serv­er that can be searched by Google. As some­one who has per­formed SEO and web ana­lyt­ics on a web site, here’s how I’d start to make the help “SEO friend­ly” so that it appears promi­nent­ly in the search results.

(NOTE: This top­ic pro­vides just an overview of “organ­ic” SEO tac­tics. The oth­er main way to improve your search results is by pay­ing for them but I won’t deal with this method in this blog entry.)

1. Dou­ble-check that the <title> tag of your online help is an accu­rate descrip­tion. I’d include three ele­ments of the title tag: com­pa­ny name, prod­uct name, and the phrase, “Online Help.” For exam­ple, “ACME RasterBlaster Online Help.” Ensur­ing the title tag is clear is one key way to help with SEO rankings.
2. Add lots of relat­ed hyper­links that point to the help. Make sure that rel­e­vant web sites (for exam­ple, your sup­port web site, forums on the prod­uct, relat­ed blogs) have links point­ing to your help, which improve SEO rank­ings. Aim for qual­i­ty links, not quantity.
3. Ana­lyze key­words. Key­words are the terms that your users type when search­ing for help on your prod­uct, such as “con­fig­ur­ing RasterBlaster.” When you know these key­words, make sure that you’ve lib­er­al­ly added the same terms to your “Con­fig­ur­ing RasterBlaster” help top­ic. Adding key­words to your con­tent is anoth­er key way to improve SEO results. Google AdWords is one tool that helps with ana­lyz­ing key­words on a web site.
4. Add meta-data to impor­tant top­ics in the help. In the <meta> tag in the HTML code for an impor­tant help top­ic, make sure you add rel­e­vant syn­onyms that ide­al­ly match the key­words a user might type in a search engine.
5. After you’ve per­formed some of the pre­vi­ous sug­ges­tions, be patient. Results don’t hap­pen overnight. After 10 days, type the iden­ti­fied key­words (for exam­ple, ACME RasterBlaster Online Help) into Google. Where are you locat­ed in the results? If you’re not ranked very well, per­haps you need to tweak your key­words, meta-data, or point more rel­e­vant links to the help sys­tem. In anoth­er sev­en to 10 days, see if your results have improved, based on your edits.

The SEO tac­tics that I’ve described are free and do work but they do not offer fast results. With some per­sis­tence, these ideas may just help your users find the answers they need.