Search Engine Optimization And Your Business Website
For a business webpage to be recognized as "relavent" in a search engine string search and come out on top, the page has to essentially be "prepared" to be detected and well-received by the search engine algorithm.
Because of the high amount of browsers visiting search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo, a new form of process was developed to make full use of the pros and avoid the cons of the algorithms used by the search engine companies. This process of preparation is called Search engine optimization (SEO).
As the amount of information grows exponentially, search engines will play a more vital role in keeping order on the internet. This has encouraged increasing numbers of people with something to look for to rely on search engines more. It simply is now a fact that you can find information faster if you use a search engine.
What search engine optimizers do then, is to make every effort to make the site considered highly relevant and show up in the top ten listing of their respective search strings. The usual method of SEO is to improve content, and dynamically expand the site with even more relevant data.
To properly optimize a web page, please follow the following steps:
Optimization should be part of the design. To properly optimize a web page, it should be considered as part of the design process. It should not be treated as an afterthought after the fact. This will lead to shoddy worksmanship and create unnecessary strain in the browser looking for relevant data.
Each web page must be optimized. That is to say, each web page must be unique, with their own content, titles and tags.
It's not just the search engines. Don't create a site specifically for search engines alone. Most people who start out this way create a site that is unwieldy and has bad grammar. Most browsers pass over unprofessional sites with poor copy.
Keywords. Make sure you have a list of terms you want placed in the page. Also consider that the keywords relevant to page 1 stays in page 1 while page 2 keywords stay in page 2. This is to make sure each page is unique in its offering, avoiding redundancy. In terms to competitiveness, a linking campaign will probably create more traffic and better results than concentrating on keywords.
Place your keywords strategically in the following areas: Page title, Meta tags, Body, Headings, Images, Bullets, Links. High quality website typically rank well in the search engines partly because more and more people recommend it to others via word of mouth, email, instant messenger, or even better, take the link and place it in their own website link sections.
Google considers pages with inbound links as a vote to the quality and relevance of that site, increasing its rank in the search engine hierarchy.
In addition to inbound links, search engines also send out spiders to assess the site for relevance against an algorithm. The spider basically goes to the site and analyzes all the text in the page, including markup items, the meta tags and the title.
Spiders can read the following items on a web page, thus making the item highly relevant to search engines: text, page titles, meta tags, meta descriptions, code, tables. Depending on further technological considerations, search engines may consider other languages like Javascript and such. Currently, the spiders will just consider them clutter.
Web page optimization values content more than graphical artistic impact. One must keep in mind when the end result needed is to increase presence in the advertiser's chosen search engine string.
Newer Is Not Always Better When It Involves Search Engine Optimization
We live in a world where everybody wants the latest and greatest, somewhere along the way we have come to the conclusion that the newer something is the better. If we are buying a CD it has to be the latest release from the new one hit wonder, we don't care if the song writer couldn't tell melody from harmony or that the singer is incapable of carrying a tune, all that matters is that it's new. Each fall hundreds of people scramble to get to car dealerships, frantic to drive the next years models, barely capable of waiting for them to be unloaded off the truck, it doesn't matter if we are six months behind on car payments on last years model which is in perfect running condition, we're blinded by all the bells and whistles that the new cars have to offer. People will stand in a long line, overnight, in an electrical storm to simply to spend an unhealthy amount of money on the latest electronic gadget just because it is brand new, we don't care that in just a few months it will be a fraction of the cost, we have to have it now.
Even internet service suffers from the right now syndrome. For years we were content with dialup service. Sure it was slow but it was that or nothing. Heck we hardly noticed that it took hours to download a simple, days to upload a couple of pictures, download a video... that was practically unheard off. We didn't know any better. Now that the world has found out about all the new options for internet service we have to have that. It doesn't matter that it is double the monthly cost or we have to default on are student loans in order to purchase the necessary equipment. If it is cordless, faster, and designed with the latest technology we have to have it...right now.
We don't care if the old stuff is made with better materials, last longer, and is cheaper. In our minds old equals junk.
Search engine optimization is one spot where we should force ourselves to shed our weird inhibitions about old stuff. When it comes to search engine optimization, age rules over youth.
Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines. The more attractive a web site appears (search engines are attracted, not to beauty, but to repetitious algorithms) the higher it ranks in the search engines search result. A low ranking could potentially be the kiss of death to an internet based business because studies have shown the internet users seldom look past the second page of hits.
Search engines use web crawlers to determine a websites ranking.
Older websites and the webmasters who manage them have had more time to develop and maintain their algorithms. They are already itemized and ranked by the search engines, in some cases it can take three months for a web crawler to get around to spidering a brand new website that has been submitted to the search engine, old sites are already appearing and gaining customer recognition. If an older site has been around long enough to have earned a loyal customer base, even if a shuffle in the rankings causes the aged web site to be bumped from prime ranking position, loyal customers will still look for it.