Search Engine Optimization

Overview

Search engine optimization is essentially marketing your web site. It is a set of steps taken in order to ensure that a web site is ranked highly on a variety of popular search engines. The idea is to get the web site to pop up at the top of the list in as many search results as possible. The difficulty lies in the fact each search engine might have a different set of criteria on which to determine the rating of an individual web site. Search engine optimization, therefore, is an ongoing process that requires reevaluation and resubmission based on testing results.

How Search Engines Work

There are two approaches used by search engines: using people to compile a directory of sites organized by topic, and using crawlers, or spiders to search web sites automatically.

Human Powered Directory

Search directory categorized by human beings. Editors review the web site’s content to determine whether it gets placed into the directory and how. To get listed by a directory based search engine you submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.

Automatic Crawlers

A technique called the “spidering process” is used to comb the pages of a web site to evaluate and determine relevant words and content of the site. A robot spider crawls each page of the web site logging its words and location. Depending upon the results of this examination, the search engine will decide how to rank the site based on specific searches made by Internet users through the relevancy of words, content and concepts identified by the site’s owner for indexing.

It is important to recognize the top search engines, since there are about 300,000 on the Internet. Google, MSN, AOL, Hotbot, Yahoo!, and Direct Hit, are a few well known search engines. Each search engine, as mentioned before, has its own unique method for ranking web sites.

To get noticed by a crawler-based search engine

Elements to Consider when Designing a Web Site

Elements relative to search engine optimization should be considered in the design stage of a web site. There are structural, lingual, and graphical tips to keep in mind. Although these tips will be helpful in presenting your web site in the most favorable manner upon various search engines, they are not guaranteed to work for all search engines

Structural

The way that the web site is laid out is an important element to search engine optimization. The following attributes should be considered:

· Content-rich information should be placed as close to the top of the page as possible because that is usually where the spider begins its search for relevant information

· Titles

· TITLE tags should be placed beneath HEAD tags because they provide information about what your site is about and is close to the top of the page where the spider begins crawling

· Each page should have its own title

· Links

· Some search engines give added weight to links in a site

· On certain search engines links are factored into the ranking equation or algorithm

· Some combination of text symbols prevent the engine from crawling so preliminary research would be necessary

Lingual

Language is important to the successful rating of one’s web site because of the process in which the site is analyzed. Keywords should be expressed in different ways using as many synonyms as possible. Words used to describe services of the site should be more specific rather than general.

Graphical

· For every image on the web site a description should be included

· Flash image pages can’t be crawled so creating an html version for submission will assist the search engine. The spider only crawls and indexes text. Since flash is an image and not text your web site would not get indexed.

Search Engine No, No’s

As optimization techniques have gotten more sophisticated, spiders have as well. There are consequences to trying to trick the spiders to get a high ranking of the web site. Many sites will be banned from indexing if the following things occur:

· Avoid heavy repetition in attempts to increase your site’s ranking in a specific topic or relevancy.

· Hidden words which are imbedded into the text background by writing in the same background color so users don’t see them, but the spider indexes them. Sometimes words such as sex, or adult which are highly searched, are dropped into a web site’s content to increase its chances to be viewed.

· Indiscriminate use of multiple pages at domains that point to the same place

· Avoid automatic redirection that takes viewers to different URLs than the one submitted to the search engine

How to Evaluate Success

It is important to check up on the success of the web site. Is it ranking high in search results? Is it attracting business or web site hits? There are two ways to evaluate a web site’s success:

Manually

This requires an extensive amount of work, but is not impossible. Go to the search engines, which the web site has been indexed in, and punch in various keywords in an attempt to access the site. Evaluate the results and ranking status.

Automated

Ranking and search result success rate can be evaluated through the use of a server log data. The data log analyzes logs that tell how much traffic the site gets from each search engine and for which pages.

Many keyword counters are free and compare sites to more highly ranked competitors. Keyword Density Analyzers can be obtained free of charge and evaluates customized searches like:

www.marketing-resources.com

http://www.kresch.com/resources/Site_Checkers/

http://www.virtualpromote.com/

http://trfn.clpgh.org/Internet/WWW/valid.html

Yeah! So What Does All of This Mean?

Search engine optimization is key to those sites that are looking to gain additional traffic, but don’t have the advertising resources of the well-known web sites. It is a way to promote a web site via search engines. If an individuals is looking up “cats” and information on your site is relevant, you want your site to be one of the fortunate sites that pop up on the first page. Why? It will be likely that it will be visited more often than a site that pops on any page thereafter.

The web has so much resourceful information that search engine optimization becomes the web site author’s way of communicating to Internet users that his/her site has the information they are inquiring about. Although many Internet users believe that search engines just pop up the most relevant to the least relevant, that is not always the case. If an individual did not follow many of these tips, it is possible that they are not optimizing their web site, or maybe the format of their site isn’t so compatible for a specific search engine, but will rank highly at another search engine.

It is a marketing tool used to promote the fact that a site exists for a specific purpose. When the amount of traffic to the site dies down, it is probably a good time to resubmit and evaluate the site to the search engines. This process requires frequent checks and changes.