Web SEO: Search Engine Optimization For Your Web Site

Web SEO is the optimization of a web site to achieve higher ranking on search engines. Search engine optimization can best be analogized to a simple trip to a library.

When you ask a librarian for a book on “foreign travelâ€, most probably you will be asked a few questions to clarify your request. Unfortunately, search engines are not interactive and don't have the ability to ask you questions to narrow the search, as a librarian can. Nor can they rely on judgment and past experience to rank web pages in the way humans can.

So, how do crawler-based search engines go about determining relevancy, when confronted with hundreds of millions of Web pages to sort through? They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm. Exactly how a particular search engine's algorithm works is a closely kept trade secret. However, all major search engines follow the general rules below.

PAGE OPTIMIZATION (Location, Location, Location...and Frequency)
One of the main rules in Search Engine Optimization and ranking algorithms involves the location and frequency of keywords on a Web page. Call it the location/frequency method, for short.

Remember the librarian example? When looking for "foreign travel", it makes sense to start the search first looking at books with foreign travel in the title. Search engines operate the same way. Pages with the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic.

Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a Web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.

Frequency is the other major factor in search engine optimization and how content relevancy is determined. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a Web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other Web pages. However, using the keywords too many times can have a negative impact and cause a listing to be dropped or removed.

A page MUST have the proper Meta tag infrastructure to be indexed by the search engines. These tags have to be optimized around the content of the page (the keyword).
However, it is not enough to add a few Meta tags. It is not enough to just submit your site to search engines and directories. Having a strong Web presence requires an ORGANIC process that constantly evolves the Web site. The rules of search engines are dynamic and one needs to change with them.

A “smart Web site†is one that is fully optimized and hence “search-engine-readyâ€. Please contact us for more information on our search engine optimization services and a FREE consultation of your Web site.