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The Basics of SEO

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is one of the hottest topics in web design and development today. A high search engine ranking can be worth millions to an organization that does commerce on the internet. But, what is it worth to small to medium sized business owners and what level is right for you? How can your site be found and how do you earn a higher ranking in the search? How do search engines work and what search engines are important? Let’s start!

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art and science of making your website visible to search engines like Google, and perhaps getting ranked higher on those search engines.

How is it done?

Search engines have tools that search all the millions of webpages on the internet and categorize all the content in large databases. They then take all this information and process it with their own algorithims (an algorithim is a formula or recipe for analizing information) to produce the most relevant results when someone types words into their search engine. We don’t know exactly what these formulas are, because major search engines keep their algorithms as secret as the formula of Coca-Cola! The reason for secrecy is to prevent the exploitation of the services they provide. Search engines want to provide their audience with the most accurate results. One of the great challenges of SEO is that there are more than one search engine and they are constantly changing their algorithims.

What are the most important search engines & indexes?

There are literally hundreds of search engines and indexes on the market today. Fortunately, almost all of them draw information from five: Google, Yahoo, Open Directory Project, Ask.com, and MSN. If you cover these, you’ve captured over 90% of all searches.

How to design for SEO:

Here are some basic guidelines for designing with SEO in mind:

Make your site and content visible to search engines. An easy way to do this is to design using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and stay away from meaningless graphics and the gratuitous use of flash.
Make you content meaningful to search engines. Establish your keywords (the words that an end user would type into a search engine) and make sure that they are used throughout the site and in the right places.
Don’t upset the search engines by trying to trick them. Stay away from designing pages in frames and using “black hat” techniques that some may promote. Play it straight up! (See “Black Hat vs White Hat” below.)

After the initial design, some more chores:

After you’ve designed the site with basic SEO in mind there’s still more work to do:

Submit to the indexes and search directories
Build other links to your page
Keep adding relevant content
Repeat the process every so often, depending on how important SEO is to your overall marketing strategy.

SEO tasks summary

In general, SEO relies on some very basic tenets of web development. Metatags, keywords, page titles, and sitemaps are an integral part of the code and site structure. Submission of your site to a search engines and having other pages link to your site are a few non-structural ways of increasing your ranking. Search engines do adjust their algorithms with regularity and we see hyped trends decline giving way to newer ideas for optimization.

White hat vs. black hat techniques

As I mentioned before, you should approach SEO straight up, with honesty. Site managers should provide a long-term solutions focused on developing and earning a ranking rather than hoping for a quick score. Keyword-saturated, engine-oriented content is the ghost of SEO past. Same with spamming the search engines with “invisible text” and “doorway pages.” And, if you are a custom motorcycle builder, it would behoove you not to list “Harley-Davidson” in your metatag markup. Search engines have evolved to thwart SEO tampering. In fact, some engines have gone so far as to ban these sites from registering at all.

Where is the magic bullet?

As usual, there is no magic bullet. You cannot pay $39.95 and do a capable SEO job. What goes around comes around, and that is true in this aspect of designing a web presence. By centering your content and design with the user in mind, you have already taken the first step to search engine recognition. Designing for browser compliancy, accessibility, and usability sets your website up for being ranked higher. Creating clean, consistent and relevant copy and providing regular updates will keep the engines crawling all over your pages. This provides a dual service to your audience as fresh content will keep users crawling over your pages as well.

What SEO is right for me?

The amount of SEO should match your goals. If you are developing a website to have a simple web presence and want people who are searching for you to be able to find you, then following some of the simple SEO guidelines will be enough. Relevant content is the key! If you intend to build a site that drives business as part of your marketing plan, then a more systematic approach to SEO may be in order.

Resources

Here are a couple of books that I have found helpful in learning about SEO:

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, by Peter Kent

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, Jennifer Grappone & Gradiva Couzin (That’s an hour a day, for 90 days! –AM)

There are several SEO websites on our links page on the Commareus.com site.