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Basics of Search Engine Optimization part 1

Written by: Mark FitzGibbon

Article Overview: Having a website with no visitors is very much like having lots of corporate brochures designed and printed but never finding any prospects to distribute them to. All too often web designers build sites which, although attractively designed, will never rank well on the search engines for that company's product or service. This is because they may know lots about how to design something eye-catching and attractive but nothing about what search engines need to see for success in the search engine results pages ("SERPS"). This series of tutorials starts with an introduction into how search engines gather information from sites and highlights some common mistakes made by web designers in their build methods.

Basics of Search Engine Optimization part 1

The bottom line is that there are good and bad ways to actually build a website, irrespective of how it actually looks to the human eye. Two sites could, in theory, look nearly identical as far as humans are concerned, but one may be built in what I call a “search engine friendly” way (highly visible to a search engine), and the other may be built in an inappropriate way which, to a search engine, looks completely invisible.

To understand this a little more, we need to think about how a search engine works. A search engine is, effectively, a very large database. A database query will only get a result if the thing being queried exists somewhere in the database. So if your site sells green widgets, and you expect someone to be searching for 'green widgets' on the database (search engine) then clearly your page needs to mention 'green widgets' prominently (and in the right way; but we'll come onto the method later). That is not so daft as it may sound. So many times have I seen sites which look fantastic but completely miss this critically important, yet simple, necessity. Some, for instance, may use flowery sales language on their home page, for instance talking up the company's history, pedigree, turnover, number of employees in 20 countries and so on.... but not mention the fact that their business is involved mainly in selling green widgets (or whatever) until several pages into the site. Other times a company may actually prominently show a graphic reading, "Green Widgets For Sale" right there on the home page ... but do it as part of a graphic (not real text), for instance a heading photo-montaged onto a photograph. Search engines, like databases, can't read pictures. Search engines thrive ONLY on 'real' text. So the graphic which reads (to humans), "Green Widgets For Sale" is completely invisible to a search engine. As an aside, I should add that there are small things which can be done to 'graphical text' which will help overcome the invisibility a little bit - but only a little bit - (I refer to what's known as "ALT" tags which are the little text messages which sometimes pop up when you hover over some photos or other graphics within a website - e.g. if using a browser like Internet Explorer). However, the ideal would be for the green widget heading to be "proper" text in the first place because an "ALT" tag is not enough on its own.

Another common mistake website designers make is to use what's known as 'frames'. You can tell when a page has been built with frames if you reduce the size of the browser window (e.g. Internet Explorer) and then look for 'extra' scroll bars within the general layout. These are a dead giveaway normally for the use of frames. What frames actually do is 'embed' one or more 'sub' web pages within one 'main' web page outer. So in effect you have several web pages patchworked together to look like one (to humans). What happens normally in Google with framed sites is that it sees the outer (devoid of text) holding frame but not the inner pages which contain the actual content and text. So there is nothing for it to add to its database (or 'index' as it's known).

A useful test to see how visible your site is to Google would be to go to Google and enter http://www.your-site.com into the search box (obviously replace “your-site.com” with your own site address) and hit enter on your keyboard. When the result appears (assuming your site is in Google's index) don't click on the main link, instead click on the word 'cached' underneath. Then, in the window that appears next, you'll see Google's blurb in a box at the top. Look for a hyperlink in that box reading something like "CACHED TEXT only" (sorry, they keep changing the wording!). Click that and then you'll see how much text Google has found in your page (and added to its index). Bearing in mind that graphics are irrelevant to search engines, you should be looking for lots of text appearing, preferably with your page's main keyword (product or service) somewhere close to the top. Going back to the previous paragraph about frames, or sites relying purely on graphics, those type of sites would show up zero (or close to zero) cached text in the Google page I've just described. What this means is that, effectively, those site are invisible to a search engine because there is no data (text) to add to the search engine's database.

That's probably enough for Part 1 of this "Basics of Search Engine Optimization" tutorial. I'll develop this further in Part 2 very soon.

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Article Tags: bottom line, database query, database search engine, databases, graphical text, heading, human eye, invisibility, little bit, pedigree, photo, photograph search, search engines, turnover, widgets



Related Forum Posts
What Do You Want To Be Taught? - Hi, My name is Jeff Foster, I will be moderating this new section. I want to get your opinion on topics you would like to discuss & be taught on. I see a great need for small business owners to learn how to perform basic Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which would include the basics about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What do you want to be taught on? Jeff
Re: Search Engine Optimization - If you are interested to get more information about Search Engine Optimization you can visit Search Engine Watch site gives you a great way to keep up with what’s going on in the search engine world. This site provides a ton of information about a very wide range of subjects related not only to search engine optimization, but also the flip side of the coin; subjects related to searching online.
Re: Can someone explain Search engine optimization to me? - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) could be compared to a big popularity contest: A High School Computer Geek and a High School Football Captain who are trying to promote a party. The computer geek tells everyone in school & even hands out 100's of flyers about his party Friday night...what happens? his friends end up showing up and a few new people...even the new people leave right away because it is not what they are looking for. The High School Football Captain ends up just telling a few good buddies, and within hours the entire school not only knows about it, but everyone wants to come, and everyone does come & stay. One defenition of "optimize is "To make as perfect or effective as possibe." How effective are your article marketing campaigns? Could you be distributing content (that is what search engines index) more effectively? In a perfect world, who would you want promoting your website, web pages, and web content? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is determining this perfect & effective way to do this. Jeff
Re: How do I engage seo works to be done for my site? - I read "Search Engine Optimization" for dummies. Gave me a real good foundation on which to build my sites. Really helped a lot.
Re: How to Promote Your Business Online - Apart from using Search Engine Optimization or SEO for promoting websites, I also find Pay per Clicks (PPC) to be a very good way to do. Why? For me it doesn't open only one oppurtunity for you, in fact it opens 2! You can generate your awaited traffic even w/o saying stop, ready and go and gain a maximized profit too.


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