This overview is written for those new to search engine optimization. It provides a broad look at search engine optimization and contains links to more detailed information for those interested.
Topics 1. Does my website need SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
2. How search engines work 3. Paid Placement vs. Natural Placement 4. Keyword Research 5. The Long Tail of Search 6. A Search Engine Friendly Website 7. Search Engine Ranking Factors 8. Conclusion Does my website need SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
Millions of people use the web every day to search for products, services, or information. Over 95% percent of those searches are done on one of the four major search engines; Google, Yahoo!, MSN, & Ask (formerly AskJeeves) (AOL search is powered by Google). Although market share changes on a daily basis, Google now handles more than 60% of all searches, Yahoo 24%, MSN 9% and Ask 5%.
If your website is not properly optimized then your potential customers will have a difficult time finding your website. Recent studies show that over 90% of web surfers click on websites that are found on the first page of their search results. Ultimately, search engines would like to find all sites and rank them perfectly, but there are many roadblocks that can make this difficult or even impossible (more on this later). And, even though your website may be search engine friendly, it may not rank well for the right terms. An important part of SEO is to discover which words or phrases your clients are typing into search engines when they attempt to find your information or product.
How Search Engines Work There are two essential functions that a search engine performs in order to ultimately display search results.
Indexing (crawling) the Web Search engines run automated programs called “bots” that browse through the World Wide Web and place all the information into a database. This process is called “spidering” the web. Experts estimate that approximately 10 billion web pages have been spidered out of more than 20 billion web pages existing.
Processing a Search When someone types in a search, the search engine will retrieve web pages from their database based on their ranking algorithm. An algorithm is mathematical formula that is used to sort information. In the early years, a search engine’s algorithm was simple and focused on factors like meta tags Nowadays, a search engine’s algorithm takes hundreds or thousands of factors into account in an effort to rank the most relevant and useful sites first.
Certain elements of a website can hinder the indexing process of a search engine. The following factors are well known throughout the SEO industry, but you should know that these factors couldn’t be proven since all search engines keep their algorithms secret.
Roadblocks that hinder a Search Engine from spidering your site - Dynamic URLs, i.e. www.website.com Search engines may be hesitant to fully index these pages for several reasons. The engine may see the dynamic URL as being depending upon a user id, which means that the page will be different depending on the user or you must be logged in to view the page correctly. These pages are often created automatically by databases, which search engines may see as being a less important than a page that was manually created. It is widely believed that dynamic URLs with more than 2 parameters are indexed much less often.
- Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages. This is a clear sign to a search engine that the page is “spammy”. This means that the page is used to artificially attempt to get the site to rank better in search engines.
- Pages not found within 3 clicks from the home page. Since the homepage typically ranks best, any page that is buried deep in a site is considered much less important to a search engine.
- Page that require a “Session ID” or a Cookie. A search engines may not spider pages that require cookies or session IDs.
- Frames. A web site or web page that uses frames (a type of html code) may not be spidered or indexed fully by a search engine. Also, even if the page gets indexed, the rank of the page may not be as great due to the use of frames.
Roadblocks that prevent a Search Engine from spidering your site - Pages found only through a form or submit button. For example, a search engine would not index a “thank you” page that is displayed after you submit a contact form because search engine bots do not fill in forms.
- Flash. Search engines cannot read anything inside of a flash element. If your site is entirely made up of flash, then the search engine would not be able to find any inner pages nor would the engine be able to read the text within the flash - Pages are only found through a drop down menu. Search engines have trouble reading almost all drop down menus, although a couple select companies have created proprietary drop down menus that can be read by search engines.
- Pages that require login. Search engines cannot login to a website and therefore do not spider pages that require login information.
- Javascript. Most JavaScript is not read by search engines.
An optimized website should have direct html links to all pages within a website. The links should preferably be text links, but image links can suffice. An html site map is also highly suggested and the sitemap should be reachable from all pages of a website. Usually, you see a link to a site map in the footer (bottom portion) of a website. It is also suggested to have a logical link structure to your website. The structure of your site should mimic an outline or table of contents. This mean that the most important pages (topics) should be reachable from the home page and the sub pages (sub topics) should be reachable from those important (main topic) pages.
Paid Placement vs. Natural Placement This section simply explains the difference between Paid Placement and Natural Placement within search engine listings. Many web surfers do not know that some of the listings that search engines return are really just advertisements. These listings are commonly referred to as pay-per-click listings because the advertisers pay a certain amount for every click that is received.
There are advantages and disadvantages of both.
Paid Placement The main advantage is that your website will rank high on search engines right away (immediate gratification). If done with care, you can receive an excellent return-on-investment (ROI). Paid placements will not help your site rank better in natural results.
Natural Placement The main advantage is that once you rank high, you don’t have to per-per-click. It takes time to get your website ranked highly on search engines, but the long term costs are much less even if you work with a search engine optimization company.
In almost all cases, it is suggested to combine your efforts and budget between Paid Placement and Natural Placement campaigns. Even when your site ranks #1 for a particular keyword, it still may be smart to run a pay-per-click campaign for that keyword because many surfers prefer clicking on the Paid Placements.
Keyword Research Choosing the correct keywords to focus your optimization campaign on is critical. Ideally, you would like to focus on a keyword or term that is searched often, brings targeted traffic, and has little competition. The internet has developed a very competitive landscape over the years and finding keywords or terms that fit these criteria has become more difficult. SEO experts use several tools to help them discover the best keywords. Some of these tools they develop for internal use only and others are open for public use (many are even free). Nevertheless, you can not afford to overlook the importance of choosing realistic keywords or terms that your site can actually rank for. The most logical optimization campaign will focus on easy, realistic terms at first. As the site becomes more popular, you can start to focus on the more competitive search terms. Popular free tools are inventory.overture.com uv.bidtool.overture.com nichebot.com and adwords.google.com Many SEO experts also manually search for terms and then manually review the top ranking sites.
The Long Tail of Search This may be the most underestimated subject in the search engine optimization field. The long tail of search refers to all of the more specific searches that are made on the Internet. For example, most mortgage companies would optimize their site in the hopes of ranking highly for the search term “mortgage.” The long tail of search refers to all the more specific searches that are made, like “new jersey mortgage broker.” First, it is important to know that web surfers are becoming more savvy searchers every day and specific searches are becoming more commonplace nowadays. Second, it is easier to get high rankings for specific searches. Lastly, specific searches can often bring you the most targeted traffic, which will result in higher conversion ratios. More SEO companies are targeted the long tail of search because of these reasons. The idea is to rank high for 20 specific searches that will bring you targeted traffic, instead of trying to rank high for one broad, very competitive search term.
This is especially important when it comes to ecommerce websites. New technology in ecommerce applications can now allow every page of your site to rank well and be search engine friendly. The most common feature of a search engine friendly ecommerce website is called url-rewriting. This refers to a behind the scenes operation that will translate all of the database driven product pages into static search engine friendly web pages. Unsophisticated ecommerce applications will leave your product pages with long dynamic URLs. What does this mean? When a web surfer types in a specific search, like “Apple 60 meg video iPod”, the search engine friendly ecommerce page (with url-rewriting) for that specific product will rank higher than the competition, which still uses dynamic pages. And, the web surfer will find your product page which will result in higher conversions, as opposed to finding a home page for an electronics website.
Search Engine Friendly Website A search engine friendly website is a site that is easily read and indexed by search engines. The site has an easy to follow navigation structure and uses html tables, div tags, Meta tags, and header tags properly. As stated previously, your site should have a logically hierarchy similar to that of a table of contents. Similarly, each page should have a logical hierarchy. The page should start with a heading, which uses an h1 html tag. As you move down the page, the topic should get more detailed and use h2, h3, h4 tags in a logical way. The html should also be structured in a way that keeps the text together so that search engine bots can read it and index it properly. Some web designers will separate pieces of the same article into different tables, which will separate the text in an illogical way in the search engines eyes.
Other important factors that you should pay attention to include: monitoring broken links, validating html & css, testing forms and applications within site, file size of each web page, and server speed & downtime.
Search Engine Ranking Factors Popularity of Web Site As of now, this seems to be the most important factor that search engines consider when ranking your site. Basically the more links you have coming in from other sites, the better. Don’t overlook the importance of quality & relevance. Search engines seem to be taking quality of incoming links and relevance of incoming links more seriously and there is no reason this trend won’t continue.
Popularity of Web Site within Industry Search engines now take into account the popularity of your website within your industry. You may have a site within incredibly powerful incoming links from cnn.com, nytimes.com, etc. But, if you don’t have links from relevant sites, then your site may not rank very high.
Anchor Text of Links The actual text that links to your website (anchor text) is a key ranking factor. If the text “new jersey mortgage company” links to your site, then search engines logically assume that the page that text links to is relevant to “new jersey mortgage company.” Therefore, the website and web page that receives that text link will rank higher for the search term “new jersey mortgage company.” The same logical applies to internal links within your website.
Text Surrounding Links Search engines also believe that the text surrounding a link is an important ranking factor. So, the text link “new jersey mortgage company” would be more powerful if it was surrounded by text about mortgage companies. If, on the other hand, this were a link surrounded by text about casinos, then the link would be much less powerful. Ideally, you would like the entire webpage to be relevant to your website.
Age of Web Site and Links The age of your site is a major factor as well as the age of the links that point to your web site. It is even believed by many that Google will not rank a site until it has existed for at least 5 months. This is called the Google Sandbox.
Conclusion Search engine optimization is a complex task that requires a steady effort. To be most effective, your optimization campaign should be consistent. Don’t buy 100 links in one day and then sit back and wait. You should buy 1 link a day for 100 days (this is just an illustration to portray a “consistent” link building campaign). This type of consistency should be used throughout your optimization campaign.
An optimization campaign also takes time. Search engines may not see or react to changes you’ve made on your site or links you’ve received for months. For very small companies, it may be smart to run your own optimization campaign. But for most businesses, it is smart to use a professional search engine optimization company. An SEO company should have years of expertise, as well as key partners that will help to get your site ranked well. The other option would be to hire an SEO consultant. An SEO consultant would review your site and business model and then teach you the best way to optimize the site in an efficient manner that is consistent with your business.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION OVERVIEW - To learn more about this author, visit James Keough's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
|
|
|
![[Get Copyright Permissions]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.gif){kind=small}
