subject: SEO for Beginners [print this page] Search Engine Optimization -- or SEO -- is the loose set of practices and rules of thumb that help tailor a Web site and its contents to make it most accessible to the search engines most people use to find content on the Web.
While the back-end software and algorithms search engines use are tremendously complicated and sophisticated, optimizing Web pages for those search engines is hardly rocket science. The reason for that is simple: search engines are in the business of providing valuable links to their users based on the terms they search for. If their users don't find the information they need when they search, those users will jump ship for a competing search engine.
How those search engines determine what content will be of value is indeed a complicated process. But those of us who create Web pages really need to keep just one guiding principal in mind: make the content on your pages useful and people will find it. How to identify that useful content is the search engine's own particular headache.
That said, a simplistic understanding of how search engines find and identify content out there on the Web helps Web-page creators to make sure they've provided all the basic signposts that can help lead engines to their content.
But it's important to remember that a lay person's understanding of the mechanisms at work are always going to be simplistic. It would be bad business for a search engine to lead its users to bad content -- disreputable commercial sites or sites that are different from what they appear to be. Necessarily, those search engines -- Google, Yahoo, Bing -- have developed complicated software that they update constantly to evade the latest set of tricks employed by less-than-reputable site owners.
If you've created a page with a purpose, you need only remember that its purpose should be plain and apparent, both to your human readers and to the crawlers -- spiders,robots or bots -- that discover and catalog all the content out there in the ether.
Just as you'd always write your text following the basic rules of composition you learned in high school -- a format that helps readers to follow your argument -- there are simple rules you can follow to make it easier for those crawlers to recognize what your page offers and for the complex algorithms to rate the value of your page for any keyword their user might use in searching.
Choose Your Keywords Appropriately
"Keywords" are the terms that any user employs in a Web search. If you were to type into a search engine query box the terms "Movie Times in Oakland" or "Easy Chicken Recipes," you'd expect to get quick access to listings for theaters which identify themselves as being in the city of Oakland or to articles about chicken dishes the authors identify as simple to prepare.
Decide which terms best describe the important points about your content. Then, armed with those words or phrases, you can make sure you deploy them appropriately on your pages so that search engines and their users will recognize the points you want to emphasize. When those points match their needs and interest, the search engines have succeeded in bringing interested users to the content they seek and you've succeeded in attracting visitors who are truly interested in your content, and not visitors who will leave annoyed or confused by the gap between what they hoped to find and what you actually offered.
Apply Your Keyword Strategically
As a general rule, search engines determine the importance of any keyword candidate on your site by measuring the number of times the word appears versus the number of other words on the page. The higher the percentage of the total words a particular keyword represents, the more importance a search engine will usually assign to it.
These are general rules, because each search engine's back-end software is also looking to skirt the more disreputable tactics employed by many sites out there. For example, if it were to determine that some instances of your keywords are not visible to actual readers -- perhaps they're hidden behind other content on the page or maybe the color of their type matches that of the background, leaving them invisible to the naked eye -- that search engine would probably discount the importance of those words and of your site overall.
Other uses of your important keywords can contribute to the overall value an engine assigns to your page:
using the keyword in image file names (and their "alt" tags) when the image actually constitutes content that supports the theme of the overall page
using the keyword in the page's title tag: the text that appears at the top of the browser window when it displays the page
using the keyword in other "meta" tags, like the description tag (the text that most search engines display as an explanation of each result they return) or the keywords tag (a list of appropriate terms that some search engines may consider when ranking the importance of your page based on those terms)
using appropriate keywords in internal site navigation: the links that allow your visitors to move from one page to another
using important keywords in titles and subtitles within your page, either by assigning HTML title tags ("H1," "H2," and so forth) or even by simply using bold-face type
Work with The Search Engines
This involves a bit more technical work than simply writing a good Web content. But the primary search engines allow you to alert them to the presence of your site and to help them find its pages more easily.
Yahoo allows you to submit the URL of your site for its consideration. It's simple enough to do and may help its crawlers to find and index your site's pages more quickly.
Bing also allows you to submit your site for consideration, and to submit a sitemap in XML format. The advantage here is that you have the opportunity to provide the search engine with a full inventory of all of your pages. If you've provided adequate links within your site to point to all of your pages, that shouldn't be necessary; but it certainly doesn't hurt.
Google provides both of those features, plus surprisingly robust tools for keeping track of how many visits your site is getting, how many other sites link back to your site, and which keywords its found and their relative importance.
Extra Credit: External Links to Your Site
This will involve much more work on your part and is, in short, the holy grail of Search Engine Optimization. The more links back to your site a search engines discovers on other sites, the more important it determines your site's pages to be. All of this is far from absolute. The kinds of sites those links appear on earn different levels of ranking from the various search engines. But, the general rule is : if other folks think your site page are important enough to link to, they're worth considering.
Naturally, all of this business of optimization becomes much more complicated for big commercial sites that are fighting to come up on the first page of results when people search for "refrigerators" or "best selling novels." But for those of us who have more modest goals -- and offer more rarefied content -- it's not so terribly difficult to improve your search engine rankings and to come up on the first two pages of a related search.
Just for example, I'll share with you some pages I created for a job search I'm conducting. I've targeted the names of local people who might consider hiring me and built my pages, using those proper names as my keywords. Since there's far less competition for a proper name than for a generic consumer product name, my work is much more simple. Each time one of my target audience members searches for his or her own name, I hope their search engines of choice turn up my sites in their first page of search results. Take a look at the following pages; you'll see that their keyword -- those proper names -- weigh heavily as a percentage of the total words on each page. In addition, the graphics, title and keywords all lean on those same key words.
Good luck with your own Search Engine Optimization. But remember: search engine results change over time. Give your site at least two or three weeks before expecting to see any changes from your optimization work. If you're looking for more involved explanations on how to achieve better results, check your book store, any number of SEO blogs and news sites our there, or just follow Google's own tutorials and explanations.
