SEO
This article makes Search Engine Optimization understandable to those who pay for the services and know little about. There are designers out there who claim they can get you to page one, however, there are no guarantees. This article will give you the ability to see your web pages in a new way and find out if you are getting what you pay for.
SEO 101 - Basic Principles of Search Engine Optimization
Written by Bryan Moore
A client may not see behind the closed doors of a web page and most don't understand the coding and techniques for building a web page. This is where a designer can pull the wool over the client's eyes and charge for something they know little about or don't know at all. SEO is very time consuming, but if done right it is very effective. So what is a person to do to avoid getting blinded by deceitful web designers and developers?
First and foremost is to have rich content and lots of it. One way to know when you have enough content is to compare with your competitors. Make sure your information is relevant to what you are trying to accomplish with both search engines and more importantly providing visitors with useful material.
Within your content be sure to have useful keywords on the addressed topics. There are several resources that offer free keyword searches that will assist in choosing right ones. For instance, Google has an AdWords keyword search tool where you can type in topics and they provide keywords that are used the most when people search that topic. Keywords may seem obvious, but these tools will provide information on what keywords are being used and which ones you should be using.
Once you have your content and keywords it's basically up to a designer to do the rest. A well optimized website will have "meta tags" in the head of the HTML document that is your web page. These tags provide search engines with additional information about the page content, author, information, and instructions for the search bots. The most important is the "title" tag. This tag should have prominent keywords towards the beginning of the tag. The "meta name= description" tag is the snippet of information you see below each search result. These are perhaps the two most important meta tags that major search engines use. The "meta name= keywords" tag is helpful but often overlooked due to being abused. There are many other meta tags but most are not as important as the ones mentioned.
Now we know this much, what else is there? Besides the meta tag, the heading ("<h>") tag plays an important part in search engine optimization. A page can have up to 6 different heading tags. These tell search engine robots and spiders that the word or phrase within these tags is important and relevant to the page topic. It is good to use keywords inside these tags to place emphasis on them. Another way to produce emphasis on keywords and content is using bold letters ("strong" tag) and bullets ("li" and "ul" tags). Using these elements will help users and search bots recognize what is important on the page. This also helps deliver a message in a clear and concise way.
Being the client, how you can you tell if a designer or developer is doing their job up to this point? Look in the top portion of your web browser and click on the "View" button. When you click on that button and the drop-down appears, click on the "view source" or "page source" tab. This will allow you to view the source code of the web page you are viewing. You will see (or should see) the "title" and "meta" tags at the top of the page. As you scroll down you should see heading tags (h1, h2, h3...) throughout the page placed on keywords and section headings. You should also find bold text and bullets for key points that can be seen just by looking at the web page.
There is one last point I will make that impacts page rank the most and that is backlinking. Backlinking let's search engines know that your website is important. The more links to your website from other websites the better. Hundreds or even thousands of backlinks will increase your page ranks significantly. It makes perfect sense really. If people are willing to link to you then it shows you are trustworthy and informative and your website relates the most to what people are searching for. Backlinking drives traffic to your site, creates more business, and helps search engine rankings. There are resources such as the Free Traffic System that can assist in getting your link on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of web pages to improve search rankings by article submission. Other resources are directory submissions, blogs, and link exchanges. This is very important in increasing your spot on Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
