What is Search Engine Optimization?
by Randall McCarley
September 20th, 2006
Are you wondering how to get more traffic to your web site?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a process of delivering targeted traffic to your web site. It works in three main phases:
- Be sure the site structure is one where the search engines are able to understand the site content and index that content into their database.
- Optimize the site for best performance in the search engines.
- Promote the site to gain links and improve performance in the search engines.
How well your site performs in the search engines really depends on two aspects: onpage and offpage factors. The first two phases of SEO development deal more with onpage factors, the third with offpage. And there are a lot of details to consider at each step.
Making sure the site is crawlable by the search engines means having a structure based on text and HTML. Search engines don’t read Flash or javascript (yet) so the navigation needs to work as if they don’t exist.
Internal linking is an important issue. You want to be sure all your pages are accessible through links. Pages accessible only via javascript need an HTML alternative to be effective in the search engines.
Google recommends using a text-based browser like lynx. Lynx strips the images and scripts out of the code just producing raw text. This also means CSS positioning goes out the window and the order you present your information in may change! Once your site structure is in place, you need to actually get indexed.
Optimizing your site for the best performance means selecting keywords you think your customers are likely to use and utilizing factors generally known to be effective with the search engines to rank well for them.
Common onpage factors to consider are meta tags and alt attributes for images. Onpage hierarchy is also important. The keywords you want emphasized should be placed correctly and within heading tags. Using HTML modifiers like <b>, <i>, etc. also adds emphasis.
Once your content is in place it is time to promote your site to develop backlinks (links that point back at your site). Backlinks are important because they act as votes for the search engines stating that other sites have acknowledged your contribution to the keywords used for a particular search query. The more “votes” you get the more likely your site will come up in the coveted “top 10″ in the organic search engine results pages! The more top 10 spots you hold, the more traffic the search engines will deliver to you!
Once you have a system in place it is just a matter of tracking your progress and repeating the process by adding more content that targets new keywords and then promoting that!
This sounds pretty simple, and it can be, but there are over 100 search engine ranking factors and many of those are hotly debated within the SEO community as to how important they are. And some keywords are more competitive than others.
For more information about SEO see the SEO Primer and learn about web site barriers to entry.
For a limited time, 14th Colony will give you a free site evaluation to get you started. You will get a report detailing which search engines have you in their index, how many pages they count for your site, the number of backlinks they show for you and what they think are your most important keywords. You will also get an explanation of weak areas in your site design that can be improved. This report is completely confidential and there is no further obligation. Contact us to get started!
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