Search Engine Optimization

Whether your site is an online store, an informational site, for social networking, blogging, gaming, or whatever, you probably want people to find you. And usually there is a specific group of people that you want to find you and maybe some kinds of people who you wish would not find you. This is all done through Search Engine Optimization.

The topic is far too large to cover here in a comprehensive way. There are many books written, online advice offered, and businesses specializing in just this area. Large companies have full time staff devoted to improving their ranking with search engines.

Many variables will contribute to your site’s ranking. But there are some basic steps that can be taken to give your site the best chance of being ranked highly.

One of the most important strategies for SEO is what’s known as link popularity or inbound linking. This refers to the number of times that your site’s domain is linked to from another site. The more times that one of the search engines records your domain in its database, the higher the value it places on that domain. But relevancy is important. If your domain is linked from a completely irrelevant site, the spiders are smart enough to figure that out and will not include it.

There are also important strategies which should be used within the programming of your site. This is known as organic SEO. All the spiders look for a sequence of related pieces of information. Things like page name, page title, page description, keywords, headers, image tags, link descriptions, and paragraph text. All these things taken together, provided there is consistency and relevancy among them all, are what the search engines will use when considering the value of your site relative to the criteria that a searcher is using.

Link popularity and organic SEO are techniques that do not cost any more than the initial time to implement. Outside of fee-based strategies, these are the best approaches to getting your site seen by your target audience.

For a no-cost evaluation of the optimization of your site, contact me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 11:52 am and is filed under Website Design & Development, Website Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.