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Search Engines and Your Website
Part 1 - The Basics
By John Joyce, President
Red, Incorporated
Strategic Marketing and Design
If your business has a website at all, chances are you have heard a lot about 'Search Engine Optimization.' Most business owners I talk to have heard of it, but don't understand much about it ... let's face it, it sounds confusing and technical when 'web guys' get talking about 'meta tags' and 'keyword density'. In the most elementary sense, search engine optimization is making sure that your website ranks as highly as possible when people are searching for things relevant to your business. -- There, that sounds simple doesn't it? Of course, as with many things, it's easier said than done.
Some studies say as high as 90% of online traffic comes though the search engines. Search engines are by-far the busiest websites on the internet. Even if you just consider your own browsing habits it is plain to see why ranking well on the search engines is important ... but how does it happen? How do search engines decide what pages are important and what pages aren't? Do they even know I'm out there?
Search engines have programs called spiders (or sometimes robots or crawlers) which are constantly looking around on the internet, finding web pages and trying to figure out what they are all about. They decide what your site is about by reading your web page code and using formulas to determine what words are important in its context. They also analyze other websites to determine if those sites consider your website relevant. Search engine optimization involves making sure that your webpage is constructed in a way that gives the search engines what they need to interpret your site correctly. Search engine optimization also takes into consideration the ways people search and the keywords they are likely to use.
Some of the things that search engines look at when interpreting your site's pages include the title, the file name, the name of any subdirectory it is in, heading tags, the copy in your page, image tags and your domain name. It is important to have keywords people are searching for in these tags. You can see these tags by right clicking on a web page and choosing 'view source' from the popup menu that appears. Visit a few websites and take a look at the source and see if you can notice the way people have used keywords. In my
next article I will go over some "
Dos and Don'ts" to consider when search optimizing your site, or working with someone who is doing it for you.
