Search Engine Optimization

A key part of any website is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.  Some of the best websites on the internet have not been seen by most people, because while brilliantly done, they are not in the search engines and therefore not found by most people.  Whether or not you decide to use a website SEO company depends on your budget, web skills, and personal goals. 

If you do decide to use an SEO company, be careful of any that make outrageous claims like being able to get you in the top 10 organic results in Google or Yahoo right away.  Years ago that was possible by gaming the search engines, but that is no longer really possible with the complicated algorithms that search engines use today.  Promises like that usually come from bad SEO companies known as “Blackhats”, who try to trick the search engines to rank websites highly, as compared to “Whitehats”, who tweak websites to make them naturally more usable to both visitors and search engines. 

Search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms to prevent blackhats from getting websites that don’t deserve to be at the top of the search results ranked highly.  In fact, there have been many times in the past where search engines have punished websites by lowering their page rank for using techniques that the search engines feel were being used only to increase search engine placement, such as loading pages with lists of keywords just for the purpose of being indexed for those keywords.  One thing I’ve always found interesting is companies that promise top ten placement, who they themselves do not have good placement in search engines, except for ridiculous keywords that no one would ever use.

The whitehat credo, and best practice, is to gear web pages for the people visiting them and the search engines will follow.  

There are many resources online to get detailed information for free on SEO.  The previous mentioned WebmasterWorld being one. 

The basics of SEO are when designing your website, make sure it’s done in a way that people and search engines will be able to read, index, and categorize it. 

Make sure that the titles of your web pages accurately and descriptively tell what the page is about.  Use the alt tags with pictures to help search engines know what the picture is.  Make your anchor text, the text you use to link pages, describe what page it’s linking to.

Some other good SEO procedures are making sure the keywords you’d like the page to be found for are mentioned in the page a few times.   For example if you have a page selling kittens and want that page to be found for the keyword “kitten”, or “kittens for sale”, it’s a good idea to have those words on that webpage.  In the past, you could just have a list of keywords at the bottom of the page to attract search engine spiders (what search engines use to index websites, they crawl the web), but search engines got wise to that trick, and now will look for the key words to be naturally placed in sentences and on topic.