Considerations in Search Engine Optimization

Published: May 24th, 2009
Author: Ron
2000 Comments2009-05-24+22%3A10%3A10Ron

You want your website to be appealing to visitors.

That’s why you spent all of that time perfecting its design and building its great content. Now that you’re prepared to welcome human visitors, you need to find a way to impress another potential guest–the search engine robot.

You need to create a page that the Googlebots and other spiders will love. You want them to report back on your great content and everything else you have to offer. You want to impress them so that your site will appear when visitors type in search engine queries relevant to your content. Making your site attractive to the search engines can be a tricky proposition, but it’s well worth the effort. The search engines will be happy to send you a great deal of free traffic once you have your ducks in a row.

That requires some knowledge of search engine optimization, or “SEO”. Although SEO is a deep topic featuring nearly unlimited advice and multiple strategies, there are a few things factors that tend to be more important than the others are. Let’s examine a few of them.

Content and Keywords.

If you want to rank highly in the results when someone searches for “blue widgets”, your site had better address blue widgets. You need to have the right content. It pays to have the right keywords in place and to have original material that doesn’t appear elsewhere. Good content will impress your readers, encouraging them to link to you, which also helps a great deal in terms of SEO. There’s a reason they say, “Content is king!”

Note: At one time, websites could rank well for terms by using them repeatedly. The less-refined search engine algorithms of the past failed to identify that kind of misleading “keyword stuffing”. Today, they spot it a mile away. There is no magic number for the proper keyword density, but if you’re targeted terms are showing up more than they would in a natural, authentic discussion of an issue, you could run into problems.

Metatags.

This element of your site’s code helps to advise the search engine of what your website is about. It can also advise search engines of if and/or when to check your pages and can provide other information. Quality metatags featuring your keywords and a concise description of your site can have SEO value.

Note: Metatags don’t pack the SEO punch they once did and some people argue that they’re not very significant these days. However, they do have some potential to improve rankings, particularly with non-Google search engines. Webmasters should know that keyword stuffing and other “tricks” in metatags will NOT help with respect to SEO.

Good Code.

You want the search engines to “read” your pages accurately and completely. You also want them to notice that you’re providing a user-friendly experience and quick load times. This means that your site should be free of extraneous code and that you should opt for the most efficient ways to presenting your material. A sloppily coded site won’t help your SEO efforts.

Note: A perfect example of this is the fact that sites utilizing cascading style sheets (CSS) will consistently outperform equivalent sites relying on older tables in the coding. The need for a well-built site is one reason why many webmasters opt for content management systems (CMS) that create consistent and smartly coded pages.

Inbound Links.

Search engines notice when other sites are linking to yours. They perceive these links as evidence of your site’s potential value. In essence, they’re seen as votes of confidence. If you want the best SEO results, you will need to make the acquisition of inbound links a priority. Great content will help in this regard, but you can proactively seek out linking opportunities to aid your site.

Note: All links are NOT created equal. The best links in the eyes of the search engines will come from thematically related sites that have some authority of their own. It doesn’t pay to waste your time and energy accumulating weak links when a single “power link” can have as much power as hundreds, if not thousands, of low-value links.

Sitemaps.

A sitemap is basically a structured outline of how the pages of your site are organized. You should generate a site map and then submit that map to Google and Yahoo via a webmaster account. This will give them an idea of what their search engine robots need to “crawl” and can improve your rankings measurably.

Note: You don’t need to hand-code that site map. There are tools available that will generate one for you. Evaluate your site map before submitting it. Look for flaws, orphaned pages, etc. and use it to “clean up” your site for optimal performance.