Introduction to Search Engine Optimization


Before You Begin

If you have a website, it's a given that you need to be found in the search engines. Search engines are where people go to find information on the Internet.

Before You Begin to Optimize:

  1. Ensure that your site has proper navigation. The search engines need to be able to follow your links, just like a real person visiting your site. Sometimes, what distinguishes one site from another is simply organization.
  2. Professional, attractive design - another must. When you submit to directories, humans are going to visit your site and decide its worth.
  3. All search engines, directories or otherwise are going to index your website based on content. ALL of them. Content is the key to getting your site well known around the internet. Because:
    1. You will build a quality reputation with quality content.
    2. Other sites will link to you if you have original content.

With these four things under your belt, you are ready to start optimizing your content rich pages for the search engines.

Terms

  1. Search Engine: A machine "tuned" by humans to index web pages, for instance, Google.

  2. Algorithm: An algorithm determines how the search engine will rank web pages - it is the way the search engine is "tuned" or programmed to determine ranks. For instance, the algorithm may be programmed to give a higher rank to pages with keywords in the title.

  3. Directory: A list of sites compiled by humans, for instance, Dmoz
  4. Spider: A spider goes to your site and finds your pages. It then stores those pages in a database for future retrieval by the search engine.
  5. Indexing: Indexing is when the search engine takes the pages from the database that the spider has created and places them in an order based on the algorithms of that engine. All search engines have a different indexing process - due to different algorithms - that's why you may get different results in different engines.
  6. Query: The keywords that a person types into a search box. A person is "querying" the search engine.
  7. Crawling: When the spider follows the links from the page you submit - the spider is "crawling" your site.
  8. Automatic Update: When the spider returns to your pages at periodic intervals to check to see if you've made any changes.
  9. Optimizing: You can optimize or configure your web pages for better ranks. This means that you may be manipulating certain variables on a web page in order to increase your rank in search engines.

  10. Examples of Spam
    1. Using the same keyword more than three times in your keywords tag.
    2. Putting keywords into your tags that has nothing to do with your actual page content.
    3. Using text, spacers, or borders the same color as the background.
    4. Using tiny text with keywords in an attempt to increase ranks.
  11. Keyword: A word or "query" that people type into a search engine to find websites that relate to the word.
  12. Keyword Phrase: Two or three words in a string. Some examples - "educational toys," "children's books," "wooden boats." Generally, a noun (person place or thing) and one or two adjectives (words that describe the noun).
  13. Keyword Proximity: When two or three keywords are placed together and how close they are together. For instance - "educational books" v. "educational children's books" v. "educational children's monster books" You would want words to be placed together when you think that people would type them into a search engine exactly that way - a keyword phrase.

  14. Keyword Frequency: (Also termed "Keyword Density.") The amount of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears in the text of a web page (can also include the keyword in the title, meta tags, and alt tags.) I will refer to this as a percentage. Keyword/Total Words in Text=3% or Keyword/Total Words in Text, Title and Tags=5%

How to Optimize

Process of Optimization

Research keywords.
Start by coming up with a list of words that you think people would query the search engines to find your site. From this point, you can go to search engines and do a few searches to see if those searches bring up relevant sites. Once you have a nice list of keywords, you should use a keyword tool to try and expand your keywords into phrases. See if people are really searching for you terms. A free tool is available at Google's Keyword Sandbox

Rewrite titles and meta tags.
Now that you know the keywords that you are going to be optimizing your pages for, you will go into your pages and rewrite your title and meta tags to reflect those keywords. We recommend sticking with 3-5 keywords per page. A good keyword phrase will help you more than a string of unrelated keywords. For instance, "antique gold earrings with pearls" is better than, "earrings, pearls, gold."

Rewrite text.
The next step will be to try and increase the keyword density of your chosen keywords in the body text. You might consider a 3% - 10% keyword density for your chosen words. Or another way to look at, if you have 100 words on a page, use your keywords in the title and meta tags, and then repeat the keywords at least 3 times in the body text. You should always write the content first, write it as naturally as possible. Then you can tweak it for keywords after you have some text to work with. Try to keep your keyword phrases together. For example, if your keyword phrase is "personalized kids books," you want to repeat that phrase, exactly as is, about three times on the page. Also use it in heading tags where appropriate.

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