What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or "organic" search results.  Simply put, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.

Proper SEO involves editing a web pages's content and associated HTML coding to increase that pages' relevance to specific keywords.  This, along with ongoing changes to a website help to achieve top rankings in the major search engines. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask all look for different ranking criteria. The goal is to make your site friendly to all of these search engines at once.

Natural, or Organic Search Engine Optimization is an on-going process that aligns your website's code and content with strategic keyword phrases, with the goal of assisting a search engine algorithm in understanding a website's keyword focus - what your website is all about. SEO can be simple for some websites, while others may require intense website code, content, navigation and internal linking changes.

 

Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines

Why do I need Organic SEO

Search engine traffic has been steadily increasing over the last couple of years.  Over eighty percent of Internet users start off in search engines before they buy a product or service online. Of that, nearly 90% don't go past page two of the search engine.  That's staggering!  Not appearing in the top listings for your specific keywords can mean the difference between the success and failure of your online presence, and possibly even of your business itself.

Why does my website need Search Engine Optimization?

The majority of web traffic today is driven by the major earch engines such as Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo!  If your site cannot be found by these search engines, you are going to miss out on the incredible opportunities available to you from people who want what you have visiting your site. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make an organization's success.  The opposite is also true. 

Why can't the search engines index my site without SEO?

Search engines are always working on improving their ability to crawl the web more deeply and return increasingly relevant results to their users.  Bottom-line, done correcty you can get high rankings and receive thousands of visitors, but done poorly it can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is almost nill. In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO can also help boost rankings so that content that has been found will be placed where searchers will more readily see it - in the first two pages (top 20 results).

Those companies who perform SEO are experiencing a decided advantage in increased visitors and customers.  Click here to learn about our Doxia Care Plan and see how we can help you with Search Engine Optimization.

How do I optimize my site for the search engines?

There are many factors which can influence whether a particular web site appears in the search engine results pages and where it falls in the ranking.

These factors can include:

• The number of other sites linking to it
• The content of the pages
• The updates made and with what regularity
• Changes to the search algorithm – and other factors

Here are some things to consider in order to get better rankings in the search engines:

• In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site.
• Limit all pages to a reasonable size.  Doxia Web Design recommends one topic per page.
• Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link.
• Don’t put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo as search engines currently cannot read text within images.
• Make your pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

In order to be listed in the search engines, your content – the material available to visitors of your site – must be in a format that is readable (e.g., HTML).  Such things as images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content is virtually invisible to search engine spiders. The easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place it in the HTML text on the page. Having said that, keep in mind:

1. Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned “alt attributes” in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content.
2. Images can also be shown to visitors as replacement for text by using CSS styles.
3. Video & audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines.
4. By using tools like Google’s cache or SEO-browser.com you can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines.

Consider Your Keyword Usage

Keywords are fundamental to the search process. In fact, the whole process of retrieving pertinent web pages in search engines is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of pages, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based indices.  Bottom-line, the engines have millions and millions of small databases, each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase. This makes it much faster for the engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second.

Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of being listed in the search results for a particluar key word or phrase, it’s highly advisable to make sure the key word or phrase is part of the indexable content of your document.

Consider Keyword domination

Search engines measure the ways keywords are used on pages to help determine the “relevance” of a particular document to a search request. One of the best ways to “optimize” a page’s rankings is, therefore, to ensure that keywords are prominently used in titles, text, and meta data.

When optimizing your site with keywords be sure to use the keyword:

• At least once in the Title tag, and possibly more if it makes sense and sounds good. Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible.
• At least once in an H1 header tag of the page.
• At least three times in the content (text) of the page. There may be additional value in adding the keyword more than that, but adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings - so only do so if it flows with the body, intent of the message.
• At least once in bold. You can use either the <strong> or <b> tag, as search engines consider them equivalent.
• At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can occasionally bring valuable traffic.
• At least once (sometimes more when it makes sense) in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the “snippet” of text used by the search engines).
• Once in the URL

Consider the Title Tags

The purpose of the title of a page is to present an accurate, concise description of a page’s content. It creates value and is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization.

As title tags are such an important part of search engine optimization, following best practices for title tag creation makes for terrific low-hanging SEO fruit. The recommendations below cover the critical parts of optimizing title tags for search engine and usability goals:

Be mindful of length

It is a general concensus that 70 characters is the maximum amount that will display in the search results (the engines will show an ellipsis – “…” to indicate when a title tag has been cut off).  Sticking to this limit is generally wise. However, if you’re targeting multiple keywords (or an especially long keyword phrase) and having them in the title tag is essential to ranking, it may be advisable to go longer.

Place important keywords close to the front

The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful they’ll be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in the search results.

Remember ...

Creating a compelling title tag will pull in more visits from the search results and can help to invest visitors in your site. Thus, it’s important to not only think about optimization and keyword usage, but the entire user experience. The title tag is a new visitor’s first interaction with your website, product/service and your business.  As such, it should convey the most positive impression possible.

Consider Meta Tags

The purpose of the meta description tag is to be a short description of a page’s content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results.

Think about it this way.  The meta description tag serves as advertising copy.  It's purpose is to draw readers to your site from the search results page.  That means it is an extremely important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable, compelling description using important keywords can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to your page.

Meta descriptions can be any length, but search engines generally will cut snippets longer than 160 characters, so it’s generally wise to stay in these limits.

The meta keywords tag had value at one time, but is no longer valuable or important to search engine optimization.

Consider the URL

The URL is the web address for your site (e.g., www.mycoolsite.com).  Your URL is of great value from a search perspective. They appear in multiple important locations.

Since search engines display URLs in the results, they can impact clickthrough and visibility. URLs are also used in ranking documents, and those pages whose names include the queried search terms receive some benefit from proper, descriptive use of keywords.

Place yourself in the mind of a visitor and look at your URL. If you can easily and accurately predict the content you’d expect to find on the page, your URLs are appropriately descriptive. You don’t need to spell out every last detail in the URL, but a rough idea is a good starting point.

If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don’t go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for SEO purposes – overuse will result in less usable URLs and can trip spam filters.