5 Steps to Search Engine Optimization

Posted on 28 January 2009 | by Ryan Battles

Introduction

The primary method of Internet users to find websites is through the use of search engines. That is why a website that ranks highly in a search engine's results will see a dramatic increase in traffic. Just about every website owner wants to receive such good placement, but many times they don't receive it because they don't understand how search engines work. In particular, submitting your site to search engines is only the beginning of a long list of steps that prepare your site to rise to the top of search engine rankings. This process is called search engine optimization (SEO). There are webmasters out there that try to trick search engines into ranking their pages higher for content that doesn't actually appear on the site (i.e. A malicious website that wants to trick you into clicking its link when you search for legitimate content). Fortunately, the engineers at search engines such as Google are constantly revamping their ranking algorithm to combat these search engine spammers. What is left is a series of steps that any legitimate website owner can take to make sure that their website ranks as highly as possible for the content that is indeed published within.

Step 1: Pick Your Target Keywords

How will people search out your website? Think of the words or combination of words that will be relevant to the content of your site. Each page on your website will have a different set of keywords, depending on the content. It is wise to pick two or more words as your target keywords, as a single keyword will likely result in too much competition among existing sites.

Step 2: Position Your Keywords

Make sure your keywords exist in several key locations on your website. The HTML title tag is the most important, followed by the HTML meta tags. However, search engines will ignore these tactics if the content of your website does not actually include these keywords multiple times. The earlier in the page these words occur, the more weight they are given with search engine rankings. One of the tricks that Jovia tries to employ is to code the HTML in such a way that the main content of the page occurs first in the code, followed by all the "extra" stuff like navigation, sidebars, footer, etc. This is tricky, as the navigation bar and sidebar often occur first in the order of display of a webpage. Some tricky CSS techniques are required to make this happen. The result is transparent to the viewer of the webpage, but very efficient in giving greater ranking to keywords within the main body text.

Step 3: Avoid Search Engine Stumbling Blocks

Frames, Flash, Images, and JavaScript can all kill the ability of the search engine to index a page. In fact, the search engine robot only sees the raw HTML code, so if you have valuable words printed on an image, embedded in a flash display, or dynamically occurring via JavaScript, the search engine will not see them, and will not rank them. A good idea is to build a page without these effects first, and then add them in while not eliminating the html version. This is usually a tricky feat to accomplish, and may be best left to a web professional.

Step 4: Build Inbound Links

Search engines will rank your page based off of how many other sites link to yours. In fact, the ranking of those sites give weight to the links they provide to your site. For example, a link from the New York Times website will lift your site ranking much higher than a link from your cousin's personal blog (unless your cousin is famous). You can build inbound links by commenting on other people's blogs, or asking for a link exchange, but the most effective links are created by people enjoying your content. This brings us to our next step.

Step 5: Create Useful Content

There is really no substitute for creating content that people will find worth viewing. This will lead to popularity of your site, and many people will link to it when they find the information useful. One of the purposes behind this blog is simply to provide content that people will find useful, in order to get them to link to it, increasing our ranking, and hopefully, when someone Google's "Web Studio", our name will occur near the top (that day is probably far off due to the popularity of those terms, but we'll try).

Conclusion

By following these five steps, you will surely increase your search engine rankings. There are companies out there that try to sell search engine optimization services, that employ nefarious techniques in order to increase search engine rankings. Be assured, the engineers at Google and other search engines are on top of this, and they do penalize people for using such techniques. There is no better way to increase your SEO than to follow the five steps above. As mentioned in the steps above, some of these methods must be implemented at the time of site design and development. It is difficult to go into a website once it is built and re-engineer it to become more search engine friendly. That is why it is important to hire a company that understands SEO techniques from the get-go, and will build you a site that has SEO from the ground up.