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What is Search Engine Optimization?
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Posted On: 27-9-2008 |
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What is Search Engine Optimization?Search engine optimization is the process of achieving top rankings in the search engines for a website's most relevant search terms. The most relevant search terms are the phrases that people are most likely to type into a search engine when looking for what the website has to offer. These are the search terms that it is essential to rank highly for, and these are the search terms that search engine optimization targets.
The first step is to choose the most suitable search terms for your site. Then allocate one or two of them to each suitable page within the site. One search term per page is preferable, but two per page is not so bad. Sometimes it is useful to split a largish page, that covers several closely related topics or several aspects of a topic, into two or more smaller pages so that a different search term can be targeted on each of them. Matching search terms to a page's content is essential.
NOTE: smaller pages are better than larger ones because it is easier to target a search term when there is less text on the page to dilute the focus.
Search Engine Optimization - the basicsLink structure within the site
An obvious, but sometimes overlooked, aspect of search engine optimization is to make sure that search engine spiders can actually find (crawl) all of the site's pages. If they can't find them, they sure as hell won't get spidered and indexed, and no amount of search engine optimization on them will help.
Some points to note
Spiders can't see links that are accomplished by Javascript so, as far as search engines are concerned, they don't exist. Don't use them if you want spiders to follow your links.
Google won't spider any URL that looks like it has a Session ID in it, so URLs with longish numbers in them must be avoided. These are usually dynamic URLs.
Make sure that all pages link to at least one other page. Links to pages that don't link out are called "dangling links", and the reason to avoid them can be found here.
It is good to structure the internal links so that targeted search terms are reinforced. E.g. organize the links so that a topic's sub-topic pages link to the topic page with the right link text (see below), and vice-versa.
Off-page elements
Link text
<a href="url">some link text</a>
This is one of the two most important elements for good rankings. The link text can be on pages within the site or on other sites' pages. Either way, it is important. The target page's main search term should be included in the link text. When possible, don't use identical link text for every link that links to a page, but do include the target page's main search term in the link text.
Google attributes link text to the target page - as actually being on the target page, and it treats it's pseudo-presence as being an important element of the target page. Links carry even more weight if the text around them is concerned with the target page's topic and search term(s).
On-page elements
The Title tag
<title>some title words</title>
This is second of the two most important elements for good rankings. Make sure that the page's search term is contained in this tag, and place it as near to the front as is reasonable, whilst ensuring that it reads well. There's nothing wrong with placing the search term up front on its own, followed by a period; e.g. "Pagerank. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it". The target search term is, of course, "PageRank". Obviously each page's Title tag should be different to the Title tags on the site's other pages.
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