Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (optimisation if you prefer the UK spelling or SEO for short) is a tricky, big and constantly changing area in web design. Part of the problem is that there are very few people who know exactly how they work. Whilst the people who run the search engines are prepared to say a bit, they are generally pretty cagey with this details as anyone who knows how the likes of Google work could make millions.

Wikipedia defines S.E.O. as

the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.

Generally the process takes 4 Steps

Step 1 Ensure the Site Works Properly

Web browsers are very forgiving things. Web sites that look fine to a user can be riddled with errors some of them pretty serious. These errors can sometimes throw the search engine spider off the scent and prevent the site from being properly indexed by the search engines.

Step 2 Find Popular Search Phrases

When people search on a specific topic they will go into a search engine and enter a word or phrase in the search box for that engine. The critical question is

"what phrase are they using?"
There are a couple of ways of finding out. You can use online services like wordtracker, or Google's Keywords Tool

The important thing is to go with popular search phrases that relate to the web site or the business, search engines can sometimes exclude sites if they believe the search phrases aren't relevant and may be trying to mislead them in some way.

Step 3 Build Those Phrases into The Site

Web sites and search engines work best when web pages are specific and information rich. If for example a company makes widgets (don't they always?) and two popular search phrases are "blue widgets" and "widget sizes" then the company's web site needs to have one page about blue widgets and one about widget sizes rather than trying to cram all the information onto one page.

There are critical bits of the page that need to include the phrase "blue widgets" These include

• The page title
• The page desciption
• Titles on the page
  
• The main text of the page, at the beginning
• Links
• The ALT text for the pictures
  

Too much and the search engine thinks you are keyword stuffing or spamdexing, too little and it thinks you are irrelevant.

Step 4 Submit The Site

Each search engine has it's own page for submitting a site and it's details. Each needs to be approached to submit a site individually, and it needs to be done in that apallingly old-fashioned way, by a human being! Seriously there are automatic services that claim to submit your site to hundreds of search engines that most of the big search engines will ignore. There's no short cut you have to sit down and go through the motions for each web page.

Google have a technology called site maps. These are a file in a particular format that tells Google all about your site, how your site fits together, how often and when your site was last updated and the relative importance of the different pages. If you create one of these, place it on the site and tell Google all about it it can help smooth the whole indexing process and ensure that Google sees your site the way you want it.

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