NOVEMBER 2007
SEO For Your Site
The great majority of Internet traffic is generated by the top search engines—Google, Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves. (AOL’s search engine is powered by Google results.) If your site is not found and indexed by the search engines, people cannot find it nor its contents—the products, services, and information you are trying to provide.
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving the “searchability” of a website, thereby increasing the traffic a site receives from search engines. SEO involves analyzing your business and website to determine the steps to take to generate traffic and increase your site’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keywords
Optimizing your website with keyword phrases is one of the most important
aspects of SEO. This involves including keywords in page titles, page and section
headings and in body content. It used to be that keywords in the META tags of
of a website were very important. Nowadays, META keywords have become less valued,
but the META description is still used by various search engines as
a source for the text that is displayed in the search results and therefore should
be a target for optimization. Identifying the appropriate keywords that will
generate the best results can be a science in itself!
Links
Links play a very important role in SEO and increasing your site’s ranking.
Search engines rank sites according to relevance and popularity, not only who
is linking to a site or page, but what the referring site is saying about the
site or page.
In-bound links—links to your site from other, similar or topically related sites add value and importance to your site and are highly valued. To translate this into understandable terms—a link to your website from a Chamber of Commerce site, for example, or another popular organization’s site may be more valuable than you realized. So, SEO also involves discovering ways in which you can increase your site’s popularity and relevance by acquiring in-bound links.
Links within your site play a role in searchability, too. It is good to structure internal links so that targeted search terms (keyword phrases) are reinforced. Links should be organized so that a topic's sub-topic pages link to the topic page with the appropriate link text. Navigational links—links from one page to another—are important both to people and search engines. Especially important to search engines are text links, since they can’t read images, only text.
Tools
Here’s a tool for getting started identifying and optimizing keyword phrases
for your site:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Resources
Learn more about SEO at:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization
http://www.webworkshop.net/search-engine-optimization-basics.html
If you would like help optimizing your website and increasing your site’s ranking, just give us a call at 541-830-0531 or email us.
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