According to Bruce Clay, an Internet Business Consultant and a specialist in SEO training, "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science of search as it relates to marketing on the web." In layman's terms, it's how to reconfigure a web site so that it will be ranked higher than other pages containing similar content. Often this entails analyzing and replacing the code that makes up a web site. Says Clay, "It is not the job of Search Engine Optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the web site so that it becomes an eagle." An ideally optimized web site will have been constructed with the express purpose of being attractive to the search engine spiders who "crawl" through the web, searching out sites to add to their databases. A variety of techniques are used, the effectiveness of which is magnified by being used in conjunction with one another. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Books have been written on the subject of search engine optimization (eg: Shari Thurow's "Search Engine Visibility"), but for our purposes here we can summarize the basics into Eight Simple Rules for Search Engine Success: 1. Leave out the bells and whistles -- A search engine success strategy can be dead in the water before it even begins if certain web site design features are used in constructing the site. Frames and Flash Intros are definite no-nos, as is the use of Javascript and Image Maps for site navigation. Dynamic URLs are another problem since they effectively "reset" the site every time they change. Search engine spiders like simplicity and stability, so should your web site designer. 2. Keywords are key -- Keyword phrases are, well, the keys to the kingdom. The idea is to be the target that searchers are aiming at, and that means thinking like them. A site that sells race car tires should not use "race car tires" as a keyword phrase because it's much more likely that a searcher will use a much more specific phrase when they're searching online for race car tires. Entering "race car tires" will bring up over a million sites, but entering "Goodyear D1490 rear drive tires" might only bring up a half dozen sites. If that's what you're selling and what someone is searching for, odds are you've just made a sale. Each page of a site should have its own set of keywords and keyword phrases. There are several free web sites where keywords can be tested for effectiveness. 3. The vital Title Tag -- A list of results from a search will display the various site names along with a sentence or two describing the site. This information comes from the title tag, and search engine spiders home in on a page's title tag and the keywords it contains. A common mistake web page designers make is to jam as many keywords as possible into the title tag. Search engines may interpret this to be "keyword spamming" and blacklist the site (blacklisting by Google is permanent!). A concise title and a couple of free flowing, descriptive sentences should run about 60 to 70 characters. 4. Meta tags -- Meta tags aren't as important as they used to be, but using them can boost a site's standing with the search engines IF they're properly optimized. An ideal meta tag is actually a pair of tags called Meta Description and Meta Keywords. The Description tag should be under 250 characters long and include several of the most important keyword phrases. The Keywords tag is usually about 1,000 characters long and needs to be stocked with pertinent keywords and keyword phrases. It's a good idea to include common misspellings since, wrong or not, they'll be used by people doing searches. 5. The Copy -- What a site says is just as important as how it's said. Each page of the site should contain at least 200 words of copy, and the copy should be keyword intensive. A good practice is to construct separate informational pages that link to the site's main page. This will serve to further attract the search engine spiders and other sites will find and link up to these info pages. 6. The "ALT" Image Attribute -- The images at a web site are often neglected resources. The HTML code for each image has or can be given an ALT attribute, and keywords can be inserted into that attribute. The original purpose of the ALT attribute was to display that familiar yellow description box when a cursor is moved over the image, but with the advent of search engines it's become even more useful. The descriptive phrase should certainly be used, but it should include keywords since the spiders are going to read the attribute's text. There are test sites that will indicate whether any of a page's images do not include keywords, a very useful (and free) resource! 7. Links, links and more links -- The search engines place a greater importance on link-rich web sites, perhaps because they're more "serious". Too many links, though, and a site risks being tagged as a "link farm" resulting in the site being at least ignored and at worst blacklisted. Relevant hyperlinks will help a site's standings, however. As always, keywords should be included within the text of the link and also in the site copy in front of and after the link. Give the spiders more meat to chew on, in other words. 8. Submit it -- Once a site is activated, the search engine spiders will find it... eventually. Time is money, so why wait? Every search engine has a submission form and the search engine world doesn't stop at Google. It will still take a while for a new web site to be listed after it's submitted. Approximate listing times range from one week at Altavista to two months at AOL, with the average being about one month.
Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
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