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Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an ever-evolving discipline because search engines get smarter and smarter every day. There are many useful search engines out there, including topic-specific ones, but for the purposes of this conversation we’ll just use Google to represent all the search engines.

Keywords list

Step 1: Determine for what words and phrases you would like to rank highly. These are the words you use to describe what you do, but more importantly, the words the people looking for you would use. This is called building a keyword list.

Start with a list of words. Then take the list and plug it into your search engine research tools to find phrases that are closely related and often-searched.

Content: Part I

Step 2: Start plugging those keywords and keyphrases into your website text as much as possible, but not so much that it is unreadable. It’s also important to use them in headers because Google thinks words that are in headers are more important. The headers on your site are the words that appear in larger font, a different color, etc.

Inbound links

There are several great strategies for improving rankings. The first and most important is inbound links. You see, Google is working on the assumption that we are all in high school again and it wants to know who the Popular Crowd is. On the web, if people like you, they link to you. So if a bunch of people put links to you in their websites, Google thinks you’re cool and bumps you up in the rankings. But it gets more complicated than that. On the web, the text you see in underlines is not necessarily the page you are getting sent to. The code used to display a link looks something like this:

< a href = "http ://yvod.com">This is a link to yvod< / a >

All the user sees is “this is a link to yvod.” Now Google reads that text and decides that must be what that website is about. So one of the ways you can further boost rank is by instructing people who link to you to use your targeted keywords for their link. You can make it easy for them by providing a button on your website that says “link to us” that has the code all ready for them to just copy and paste into their website.

Okay. So we need inbound links from sites that have lots of traffic, and we need the text of those links to include our keywords. What else can we do?

Content: Part II

Here’s another assumption on the part of Google: New content is better than old content. This is where blogs come into play. Because blogs are updated frequently, Google checks them frequently to see what they are saying. If you are using your targeted keywords and keyphrases in your blog, Google begins to understand over time that those are the things you like to talk about and begins giving your site to people who are searching for those words.

Meta tags

A word about meta tags and alt tags: Way back in the infancy of the web, meta tags were the main information the search engines used to index the content of webpages. Meta tags are invisible text that computers can see but humans can’t and they include “title” “description” and “keywords”. Alt tags are the text that accompanies images in case the browser cannot display them. Unethical webmasters used that knowledge to stuff all sorts of words that are commonly searched upon into those tags. The search engines got wise to this strategy a couple years ago. Now, search engines almost completely ignore them when determining page rankings.

It is, however, important to include updated tags, and here’s why: when Google presents the results, the description or title tag is often what it shows underneath the link to your site. Title tags are what the user sees in the top of their browser when they open the page. Keywords are basically unimportant, but they don’t hurt. The user will only see the first 10-15 words of your description, and that text should be compelling enough to convince someone to click on your link. It should be in a narrative format, not a list of keywords. Alt tags are particularly useful for mobile device users or visitors with limited vision who are using screen-readers to navigate your website.

Content: part III

Ultimately, you are writing content for your visitors, not for the Googlebot. If your content is timely and relevant, your visitors will find the information they are seeking. If not, all your SEO efforts are in vain because visitors will simply hit the most popular button in the browser: the BACK button. If that happens, Google notices it and thinks, this site isn’t as relevant to those search terms as we thought they were, so let’s bump them down a notch. After a while you’re back on the 100th page of results again.

So, to recap:

1. Build and refine a keyword list
2. Incorporate keywords into copy
3. Develop inbound links
4. Update content frequently
5. Use meta tags
6. Write for the visitor, not the search engines

There are a couple more, like DON’T USE FLASH, but that’s enough to get you started for now. Need more info? Drop me a line and ask me anything.

As you can see, this is a whole process - not as simple as adding a couple meta tags and walking away. It takes some serious effort, and it takes time. In general, it can take up to six months just to start seeing results. And if your site is brand-new, you should just expect to be completely invisible to Google for at least two or three months. It’s not that Google doesn’t see you. But you’re the new kid on a very, very big block and you just have to wait to really get noticed.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Marketing, Life on the internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.