The Absolute Basics of SEO
Copyright 2006 Matt Canham
Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing the
ranking of you site in search engine listings. The most
important factors to consider to achieve a high ranking are: the
keywords you use, your title, your description, the text of your
site, and the links others provide to your site.
To begin selecting keywords, consider what words and phrases the
people you are trying to reach will be searching on. When
placing keywords in your keyword tag, it is best to use phases
rather than single words. Almost all single words are in very
widespread use, thus will not tend to produce high rankings.
Keyword phrases can be better tailored to your business. Also,
since phrase searches produce fewer results, people are more
likely to search on them. It is also a good idea to produce a
list of keyword phrases for every page of your site. If you must
include difficult to spell words, it is a good idea to include
some common misspellings of these words as well.
The title is just as important, if not more important, than your
keywords. Most search engines place the highest level of
importance on the words found in the title when calculating the
ranking. You should place your most important keyword phrases
first in your title, as some search engines limit the number of
characters you can use. Make your title a readable sentence, as
this is the first text that will appear for your listing on the
results page. One thing you should avoid doing is simply listing
keywords. This could be regarded by the search engine as keyword
spamming, and may lower your search ranking, or even get your
listing removed from the site. As with keywords, it is a good
idea to give each page a unique title.
In your description you should once again make use of your best
keyword phrases. In this case, you can use more of them, since
search engines will give you typically around 1024 characters
for the description, while they will give you only around 50 to
80 for the title. Again, place your keywords as close to the
beginning of your description as makes sense.
In the text of your site you should make use of, yes, you've
guessed it, your keyword phrases. Also include any text you have
used in other tags, such as meta tags, alt tags, and headings.
Having a lot of content helps as well. A minimum of 200 words
per page is recommended. Having many pages of content also
increases your rankings.
Having many other sites link to you is another good way to
increase your search rankings. Both the links themselves and the
increase traffic which results will help. Also, having bloggers
link to your site is a good idea.
Although these practices will boost your rankings, there are
certain design elements that can interfere with your search
rankings. These include frames, dynamic URLs, Flash, using image
maps for navigation, and using javascripts for navigation. Also,
there are certain practices that search engines regard as
spamming, and these practices will get you permanently removed
from the site. These include using keywords in your meta tags
that do not relate to the content of your page, using multiple
instances of the same tag, and listing keywords in the text of
your site.
This is just the briefest introduction to search engine
optimization. One book available on this topic is Search Engine
Visibility, by Shari Thurow. Software packages that can assist
you with SEO tasks include Bruce Clay's SEOToolSET and Web CEO's
Web CEO. If you prefer to have someone else do your SEO for you,
Marinerblue is ready to help you for free with your .ws domain.
Regards, Matt