Intro to Search Engine Optimization

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Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the process of improving the quality and volume of traffic to a website from search engines by way of organic or natural search results.  This is key to getting your company’s website found on the Internet, especially when using major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.  Each search engine has a spider that crawls the Internet jumping from link to link finding and indexing websites.  If you can get your website indexed, then listed on the first page of a search engine, the traffic to your site will be substantially higher than being in the top position on page two.  In fact, you may get no traffic at all from page two results.

To get your website on the first page or #1 of the search results is an ongoing battle because your competition is working diligently to stay on top as well.  Keywords, key phrases, backlinks, and content are essential to a proper search engine optimization campaign.  Many companies try to create their own optimization programs, while others hire a company to get them placed higher.  Either way you go, it will be an ongoing campaign. 

1. Keywords:
These are the words that are relevant to your company’s products or services (ex: hosting, mortgage, music).  Search engines index (file away) the keywords of a website so it knows what your website is all about.

2. Key Phrases:
These are the short sentences that are used to find what a person is searching for (ex: web hosting, zero down mortgage, music download).  If your website only had the phrase “mortgage financing,” and people are searching for “zero down mortgage, they may not even find your website because the phrase did not exist.  You must always think of phrases people are searching for and implement them on your website in a way that makes sense.

  • Most often searched keywords and phrases are available with almost all search engines if you know where to look.  Once you discover what people are searching for you will need to decipher how to implement those keywords and phrases in to your website to increase your search engine results.  Another place to find this information is to review your own website logs to learn what words your customers are using to find your website.

3. Backlinks:
What are backlinks?  Backlinks are incoming links from other web pages or websites to your website.  The more websites pointing to your website, the more relevant your website becomes.  If you were a search engine and you compared one website with five backlinks, and another with 1,000 backlinks, which would you index higher?

  • Backlink relevancy is very important as well.  If your website sold computer parts with a backlink from a fishing website, how relevant (popular) do you think the search engine will think your website is?  A computer store that has backlinks from a computer manufacturer will have a higher relevancy and give you a higher ranking in the search algorithm compared to a fishing store backlink.  If you link too many non relevant backlinks to your site, the search engine spider may not even index your website!  In other words, you may not even show up at all, even though you are a legitimate website.

4. Content:
As they say, content is king This is probably the most important part of high ranking results.  Why is content most important?  Because if you have good content, other websites will provide you backlinks, and you will have keywords and phrases already.  Search engines will look through your website to determine if your website actually uses the keywords or phrases used in the requested search.  Not only will it search your website text; it will search bold text, italicized text, links, headers, titles, tags, site maps, and even spelling mistakes!  Search engine optimization is a combination of art and science.

Stay on top of the Search Engines

Search Engine Algorithms:
Search engines have different algorithms (or parameters; over 300!) for indexing websites.   They are constantly changing the way websites are indexed as well as the parameters that the search engine is set up to follow.  Think of the algorithm as a recipe; only the cook knows the ingredients.  Why do search engines change their algorithms?  So that relevant data can be pulled out of a pool of non relevant data.  Did we mention billions of dollars of advertising would be lost if one person knew how to get top results every time regardless of  the content?  They do not make it public knowledge!

Competitor Websites:
By analyzing your competitor’s website for valuable information in their keywords, phrases, backlinks, content, etc., it will give you some idea on how they managed to get to the top of the search results.  But, as soon as they slip in their rankings, you can be sure they will be reviewing their competitors website to see what tricks they came up with to get higher than them.  And the competitive roller coaster rolls on!  It’s a tough game and most companies that can measure the return on investment (ROI) will hire a company to keep them at the top.