subject: SEO Basics - Promote Access to a Specific Web Site [print this page] SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a marketing tool used by web developers to help promote access to a specific web site and gain more visits. When used properly, SEO techniques can help your site stand out among the sea of similar pages on the web. SEO works by taking advantage of how the various Internet search engines locate and rank web sites when a user performs a search.
The goal of any web search engine is to produce a list of usable sites, ranked by their relevance to your search phrase. You might ask how they can search the web and determine site relevance in the few seconds that it takes to resolve a search. The answer is, the can't.
Search engines use automated programs to crawl along the world wide web, analyzing web sites that it visits based on various elements within each web page. The crawler program puts the results in a massive data index which the browser in turn uses to locate sites that match your query.
Early on in web history the factors used by search engines were well documented. Unfortunately, this knowledge lead to abuse by some web site developers who exploited these factors to give them an unfair advantage and a deceptive ranking, often attracting clicks from users who were looking for content quite different that what the page offered. In response, modern search engines keep some of their techniques secret to avoid further exploitation.
Regardless, many of the old rules still hold true, and the new ones can be figured out by trial and error. Here are some things that you can do to optimize your web page.
Pay for it. Many search engines will rank your site higher for a subscription fee, much like phone books will feature companies who pay extra for the service.
Make sure each page has a title and the proper meta tags built into the HTML. Web crawlers look at these tags first to help determine relevance.
Get linked. One of the ranking criteria for a web site is the number of other sites that link to it. That is why many sites make it easy for you to put their link on yours.
One way that this is abused is with 'link farms', servers with massive amounts of web sites whose sole purpose is to link to other web sites who pay to have the link put up. Search engines can often detect this and will disqualify link farm entries from their indexing.
Have lot's of relevant content. Modern search engines look to content more than in the past when determining the relevance of a page. By including key words in your page content, you increase your chances of a higher rating when people search on that phrase.
Be advised that having too high a keyword density will be detected by search engines as potential abuse. Densities around 3-5% for text content are usually considered optimal.
SEO Basics - Promote Access to a Specific Web Site
