What is SEO?
As a web designer I’m often asked what is “SEO”? This is usually asked by individuals who are entertaining the thought of having a website for their business or have a website and they can never seem to find it in the first 20 pages of their favorite search engine. Most people really don’t know what it is or what it does which means they also don’t know how to accomplish it.
To put it very simply, the acronym “SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. What it does; improves your ebsite’s ranking in search engine results.
Everyone wants their website on the first page of any and all search engines. And, why not, you have a ton of FREE traffic, and as they say “sales is a number’s game”. Get in front of enough potential clients and you’ll make sales. Easy right?
Just remember this, there are tens of millions of websites and only about 15 spots on most search engine’s first page for each search keyword or keyword phrase. This is where the experience and knowledge of your web designer / developer comes into play for you, your business and your website.
Getting on the first page of google.com for instance requires that the website is correctly built. And, I’m not just talking about the design, and the functionality. And although these are important components, for an overall successful website, it is the content that gets you to the top of the search engines.
That’s right content. Since its inception the internet was created to pass along information and knowledge from one user to the next without obstacles or cost. Most, if not all, search engines’ basic philosophy is still the same. All search engines have spiders and robots that read every word of content on your website. Now these robots and spiders although they can read are actually blind and can’t see pictures. So you can have the most beautiful website on the works of “Picasso” with pictures of each and every one of his paintings but if you don’t have written copy all the robots and spiders see is “.jpg” and nothing else.
So now you think you have it figured out, right? You’re saying to yourself, I’ll just write pages and pages of the keyword or keyword phrase , and I’ll get on the first page of yahoo.com. Good idea, to bad you’re not the first one to think of it. Been done, and been figured out by the search engines. In fact if you were to try that today it could get your website banned from all search engines.
Here is the right solution for your SEO question:
First, whether you build the website yourself or you have a professional do it for you. Make sure that the website is built on good SEO principals:
- You have a Meta Tag on each page that will provide the correct title for that page.
- You have a Meta Tag on each page with the keyword and keyword phrases for that page and for your website.
- Each picture or graphic should have an Alt tag, describing the image portrayed. Remember robots and spiders are blind, and can only read.
- The written copy should have your keyword and keyword phrases incorporated in the message. This can be tricky as you don’t want to overload the content with keywords but you also don’t want to be caught short of your goal. A good rule of thumb, is to try and use your keywords and keyword phrase around 5 times per page. Now that doesn’t mean that all your keywords have to be on every page. For example, on portfolio page I might use “web design portfolio” or a combination of these three word where I might not use them in the pricing page, but instead use “web design pricing”.
- Make sure you have a links page. It is important to develop link exchange with other website. Search engine’s also look at a website’s popularity created by a link exchange. But it is also important that those websites you choose to exchange links with are relevant to your site. For example, I have a web design website, I exchange links with other web design website (being careful that they don’t compete with me), graphic design websites, software sites, hosting sites, etc. You don’t want to have 1000’s of links that mean nothing to you or your site. Lastly stay away from link farms, these are frowned upon by search engines.
- Write Articles and place them on your website: You know your business better than anyone else, so write about your business. Again, you have to remember the internet philosophy “The distribution of knowledge”. What you give away in knowledge will be repaid to you a thousand times over.
- Create a sitemap, you can go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and just imput your website information. It only takes 5 minute and very simple to do. The site map will provide the search engines with vital information to veiw all your pages and content.
A quality web designer/developer with build these things without you asking. But make sure you ask if this is part of the package. At the bare minimum these items should be built into your website and then allow you to manage them.
This article is written by N. A. Ferrer, Creative Director of Web4Biz, Inc.
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