Search Engine Optimization refers to actions one takes to get his web site to appear at or near the top of the regular search engine results (non-paid) for a specific keyword or group of keywords. When I refer to the "regular" or "organic" search results, I am referring to those results which appear in the wide, left-hand column on Google, Yahoo, MSN.com, etc.
Search Engine Optimization is a mysterious field, because search engines keep the algorithms they use to decide the rankings of web pages totally secret. They do this so that webmasters cannot "game" the system so that their sites appear on top of the listings. If it's one thing that Google hates, it is someone being able to manipulate the system.
But if you do not do anything proactive at all to push your small business web site up in the rankings, and if your web site not well established, it is relatively certain that your web site will NOT appear anywhere near the top of the rankings for any given keyword.
So it is vital to take actions to move your site up in the rankings for the keywords you choose. And in fact a whole industry (search engine optimization - SEO) has grown up to help people improve their rankings in the search engine organic results.
I will try to simplify the whole subject of SEO and cover it briefly here in this article. Effective SEO consists of only a few steps:
1.Selecting the keywords that you want to have your site rank well for
2.Optimizing pages on your site so that they have the potential of ranking well on those keywords
3.Building inbound links to your site
Selecting Keywords
Your site does not simply rank well or poorly on Google or Yahoo. It ranks well or poorly, specifically for a given keyword or for a group of keywords.
In other words, let's say that one of the keywords you want your site to rank well for is "gourmet coffee." So you would take actions to make your site rank well for that keyword. You'd optimize a page or several pages on your site for that keyword, then you'd build links coming to your site from other sites.
For search engine optimization, the main concept to keep in mind on what one is looking for with keywords, is words or phrases that are getting a lot of searches, i.e. a lot of people are searching for those words. The minimum figures I think with are: the bare minimum you want is over 200 - better to be 3,000 to 5,000 or more.
On the other hand, with search engine optimization (and this is not generally true with paid search engine advertising), you don't want to select keywords or phrases with too many monthly searches. The reason is that with search terms with extremely high searches (say 50,000 per month or more) there will be tremendous competition for that keyword. And there will be web sites that have been competing for that keyword for a long time. So the chances that you will be able to compete effectively for that keyword are practically zero.
It is better to select keywords that are getting some search traffic and are more specialized, i.e. more of a niche, and compete effectively for them.
I have found the keyword selection process is best served by creating a spreadsheet. Column one contains the keywords. Column two contains the monthly searches that people do for those keywords on Yahoo.
The Keywords
1. Go to your company web site and see if whoever designed it placed any well though out keywords in the metatags section of the code on the home page. Go to the home page, then select View | Source. A separate window will open up.
The line that starts out <meta name="keywords" content=" gives all the keywords. So when one of the search engines looks at the site and indexes it, it will record those keywords for your site.
Paste the keywords there in the metatags into your spreadsheet.
2. Brainstorm on phrases someone might type in at a search engine to find your type of product. Add those to your spreadsheet.
3. Select 4-5 competitor web sites, and go to those web sites and see what keywords they have used in their metatags. Add those to your spreadsheet.
4. Go to the Overture Keyword Selection Tool, which can be found at:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Take one of the keywords from your list and type it in the box, and hit the little triangle. Let's take an actual example, "internet marketing."
This page not only gives the number of people that searched for "internet marketing" in the last month, it also gives you a number of other keyword suggestions. If you get a full page of suggestions, print the page out, go over it and highlight the ones that you think would be good to put on your list. Put those keywords onto your spreadsheet and record the numbers in the second column, "Yahoo searches."
Repeat this process with any other keywords you have, entering them into the tool, then recording the number of searches, and finding other ideas. This process will also give you other ideas as you go, so make sure you record them in your spreadsheet as you think of them.
Come up with 40-200 words if possible.
5. Final selection. Now that you have filled in all the columns, it is time to select which keywords you will target for your web site.
The key data to use are:
a. Generally, the higher the monthly searches the better. You want at least 200-300, but over 1,000 is better.
b. But don't pick keywords with super high search amounts, like over 50,000. Better to find a term with decent amounts of searches, but not as much competition.
c. In general you need a selection or group of keywords that adds up to some decent number of searches per month.
Once you have made your selections of keywords, highlight those lines in Excel.
Optimizing Pages on Your Site for the Keywords
Once you have selected your list of keywords that you want the site to rank well for, your next job is to prepare pages on your site so that they can potentially rank well for those keywords. This is called "on-page optimization."
Generally, you want to select a page on your site for each keyword on your list, and optimize that page for that specific keyword. If your keyword list has 15 keywords on it, you should select 15 pages off your site, each one of which is oriented to the topic of that keyword. You could also have a page that is optimized for 2-3 of your keywords, i.e. ones that all describe the same general topic, but not much more than that.
On-page optimization consists of:
1. Ensuring that the text on that page uses the keyword multiple times, but not in a weird or unusual way.
2. Put the keyword into the keyword meta-tags.
3. Write a meta-tag description for the page that uses the keyword. This is the description the search engine lists under your title when your page appears in the listings.
4. Write a title tag for the page that uses the keyword as the first word or words. The title tag is what you see at the top of your browser when you are looking at that page.
5. There is a thing called "alt tags" on a web page. This is a text tag that gets attached to a graphic or photo on your page. Use the keyword in the alt tags where possible and appropriate.
6. There is a factor to be aware of when optimizing a page for a given keyword, called "keyword density." Search engines will look at a page and count the number of words on it, then judge it for a specific keyword or phrase, in part, by the relation between the number of times the keyword appears, and the number of words on the page.
7. Stay away from uses of Java that add dozens or hundreds of lines of code to the source code of your web page.
8. Use style sheets on your web site. Most web authoring programs allow you to create style sheets, and there is an excellent program called Style Master which helps you create style sheets, and they have an excellent (though long) tutorial. The reason style sheets are good, is that it improves your keyword density. It gets all your paragraph formatting information into a separate file.
9. Using the keyword in the "h1" and "h2" tags, meaning the headlines and sub-headlines. To do this you have to use stylesheets for the site, using them to specify the paragraph formatting.
Link Building
For information on link building, see my articles on content hub submissions:
http://www.realwebmarketing.net/article124.html
http://www.realwebmarketing.net/article125.html
Good luck with your search engine rankings.
