SEO or Search Engine Optimization 101
A website only serves a purpose if people visit it. The world wide web has grown immensely since it's inception in the 90s. As of January 2014 there was around 861,379,000 websites. So how does someone find your website? and how does Google and other search engines rank search results?
When you were in grade school or maybe even high school your parents may have joked that "it's not a popularity contest." Well in the world of the web, it is. A website's popularity is calculated by an ever evolving, complex algorithm based on multiple criteria. Just as you have to take care of your customers to stay in business, Google and other search engine providers have to take care of their customers as well. If the search results were filled with irrelevant results, no one would use their service. From that standpoint, Google directs website architects to build the site for the users and not for the search engines.
Rankings are based on two things:
Relevancy and Popularity.
Relevancy
You've probably heard the phrase "content is king". The purpose of your website is to solve or lead a customer to someone who can solve a problem. People search for information, not to be sold.
Search engine optimization is all about thinking like a customer. You want key words worked into the content, but you don't want to make the information awkward to read. The key words shouldn't be solitary terms. Instead think in terms of key phrases. For example if your website is for a dental practice in Atlanta that specializes in dental surgery, you would work the terms "dental surgery Atlanta" throughout the site.
Meta Data
Meta data is information that is invisible to the visitors of your site, but helps the search engines catalog the site. Four types of meta data:
- Meta Keywords Attribute - A series of keywords you deem relevant to the page in question.
- Title Tag - This is the text you'll see at the top of your browser. Search engines view this text as the "title" of your page.
- Meta Description Attribute - A brief description of the page.
- Meta Robots Attribute - An indication to search engine crawlers (robots or "bots") as to what they should do with the page.
Below is an example of what the meta data looks like within the code of your site.
Remember that relevance is key. Putting keywords in the meta data that aren't mentioned anywhere on your site will not direct search engine traffic to your website and could potentially hurt your results within the site because the search engines could view your site as spam.
Popularity
The popularity of your site in terms of SEO is determined in a couple ways. First, the traffic to your site will increase its visibility in search engine results. When a site first launches of course there won't be a lot of traffic. This is where a good social media strategy can help build traffic for an unknown site.
The second factor that affects search engine results is back-links. You want other sites to provide links to your content. This increases the visibility of your site to the search engines and provides confirmation that your content is useful. You also want to include links within your content to other well ranked sites.
