Search Engine Optimization – What Does It Mean To You and To Your Website?

Your website is a great marketing tool, but it’s not just about how it looks, it must be made available for potential customers to view. So marketing your website through what is called; “search engine optimization” (SEO) is just as important as the way your website looks and functions. Your website is a great marketing tool, but it must be made available for potential customers to view.  If people can’t see it, well we don’t have to tell you what happens then.

SEO is the process of achieving top rankings in the search engines for a website's most relevant search terms or what is often referred to as “keywords”. The most relevant search terms or key words are the phrases that people are most likely to type into a search engine when looking for what the website has to offer. You want your website to be recognized by the search engines for the keywords most associated with your business.

Why are we so focused on search engines, because they are one of the primary ways that internet users find web sites. That’s why a web site with good search engine listings may see a dramatic increase in traffic. SEO is a way of ensuring that your web pages are accessible to search engines. So page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

Page Titles

Make your page titles simple, yet descriptive and relevant. This will make it easier for search engines to know what each page is about, and people scanning through search results can quickly determine whether your document contains what they are looking for. The page title is also what is used to link to your site from search result listings. Because of this, the title element is one of the most important elements on a page.

A good example is as follows: Document title | Section name | Site or company name

Body copy - writing good content – it’s all about people returning to your site - Get Linked to

This is one of the most important things you need to do if you want to be found on the web. Even if your site is technically perfect for search engines, it won’t do you any good unless you also fill it with good content.
Amongst other things, good content brings return visitors. Return visitors who like your content will eventually link to your site, and having lots of inbound links is great for search engine rankings, especially if those links are from highly ranked sites. Incoming links are very, very important for SEO, so we’ll say it one more time; get linked to!

Other Elements

Use real headings

Use the h1 - h6 elements for headings. Using graphics for headings may look pretty but search engines aren’t looking for pretty so they won’t pay much attention. Even if you (as is required) use the alt attribute to specify alternate text for heading images, that text will not be anywhere near as important as real text in a heading element

Flash

Flash and JavaScript are fine, as long as they aren’t required to navigate your site and to access vital information. Don’t hide your content inside Flash files or behind funky JavaScript navigation.

Frame Smame (no offence)

Avoid using frames, while it is possible to provide workarounds that allow search engines to crawl frame based sites, frames will still cause problems for the people who find your site through search engines.

When somebody follows the link from a search result listing to a frame based site, they will land on an orphaned document, outside of its parent frameset. This is very likely to cause confusion, since in many cases vital parts of the site, like navigational links, will be absent.

Behind the Scenes – A bit more technical - The Tags

The title tag, make sure that the page's search term is contained in this tag.

The Description Tag <meta name=”description” content=”a nice description”>
Write an appealing description for the page and incorporate the page's search term into it at least once and, preferably, twice.

The Keywords Tag <meta name=”keywords” content=”some keywords”>
Put plenty of relevant keywords into the tag and include the search term once at the front, and a second time further along the line. There is no need to seperate keywords and keyphrases with commas, as is often done, since the engines ignore commas.

Bold Text
Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as H tags. As much as is reasonable, enclose the search term in bold tags when it appears on the page.

Text
Use the search term as often as you can on the page whilst not detracting from the page's readability. Make sure that you use the term once or twice very early in the page's body text and as often as possible throughout. Reword small parts, and even add sentences, to make sure that the search term is well represented in the text.

So there you have the basics about Search Engine Optimization. Please contact us if you have any questions or want to discuss what we can do to get your site in amongst the high rankers and easily accessible for all those folks out there looking for you.