The Definition of Search Engine Optimization

The Definition of Search Engine Optimization

How to define search engine optimization

The purposes of this article, will be defined as the process of making changes to various aspects of your site to make it more attractive to search engines and accessible to visitors that arrive at your site from the search engines.

Search engine optimization is not about deceiving the search engines. To optimize your site, the goal is to understand all the components that search engines seek on a web page to determine if such information is relevant and valuable to the online user. By staying abreast of the factors that search engines consider, it is completely possible to adjust your web page content accordingly and improve your site's rankings.

Search engines use software programs, known as "spiders" or "crawlers," that visit and examine your web pages to index and store the information on those pages within their server databases. These software programs can read both the page codes as well as content displayed to users.

Taking search engine optimization into consideration before you build your site will save you a lot of headaches and is obviously the best approach. Search engine optimization can also be performed after your site is complete, but will definitely require changes to make it search engine friendly and viewable to the world.

You must also understand that it will most likely take one to two months before you see the results of your work. Search engines may visit your site multiple times in a week, but they also take even longer to update their databases.

Following is a basic overview of the content and basic code that the spiders or crawlers will look for on a page. The information provided will differ for each search engine and is not specifically geared toward one. You must take more of a general approach that will work well with most, if not all of the search engines.

Domain Names

Having keywords in your domain is not a major consideration, but will help for some search engines. For example, having a domain such as www.keyword-keyword-keyword.com isn't going to do much for some engines but may help for others.

If you already have a domain name, don't worry about switching just because it isn't packed with keywords. If you follow the optimization techniques you will be just fine.

Also, don't purchase multiple domains with the idea of having duplicate copies of your Web site in order to get multiple listings in the search engines. This will likely result in a penalty from the search engines. And those multiple copies will eventually be removed.

The Title Tag

The title tag for each page of your site is very important. If you look at the top of your browser you can actually view the Title Tag or Title of that page.

Your title should include your keywords or key phrases and help describe your site, or the specific page, in a concise manor. When people are viewing a list of search results, they typically will scan down the list. Make sure your title tells a potential visitor what the page they are viewing is about.

For the title, your key phrases are more important than your company name, unless your company name is a well known brand.

Repeating keywords and key phrases over and over is likely to be penalized and looks terrible in the search results.

Meta Description and Meta Keyword Tags

These tags are also in the head section of the code of a web page and are not seen by the visitors of your site unless they happen to look at your source code.

Of the two, the Meta Description is the most important. In fact, many experts will advise that it isn't even necessary to bother with the Meta Keywords tag because most search engines ignore it.

For your home page, your Meta Description Tag should briefly explain what your site is about. Each page of your site should also have a Meta Description Tag that explains what that specific page is about. Keep it short and to the point.

Copy writing

This is the text on the page that your visitors see. This is an extremely important factor in search engine optimization because both the search engines and your visitors rely on the text on the page to understand what the page is about.

ALT Tags

Images are an important part of making your site visually attractive to your visitors. But, search engines do not understand the content of images on a page. This is true even if the images have text in them. For example, your logo may have words in it. The search engines can not read these words because they are not standard text. They are a picture.

This is why ALT Tags can be useful. ALT Tags are text descriptions that are used to describe an image on a page. These are not seen by the visitors to your site unless they look at the source code.

Sight-impaired people using special Web browsers will appreciate them because these browsers can read the ALT Tags and tell the visitor what the image is about.

ALT Tags can also be useful to your optimization efforts when used with images that serve as navigation links to a page on your site.

When set up this way, some search engines will factor in the ALT Tags for images that serve as links. This provides another opportunity to include keywords and key phrases on your site. But, don't forget your site impaired visitors. The description in the ALT Tag needs to make sense to them in the context of describing the purpose of the image.

Site Map

A site map is a page on your site that lists and describes all, or at least the most important, pages of your site and is needs to be HTML text based.

A site map is valuable for both search engines and your visitors. For search engines, it makes it quite easy for them to find all of the pages of your site. For your visitors, it is helpful in navigating your site and finding the information they need.

Dealing with FLASH

Although some search engines are beginning to implement ways to index FLASH pages, they generally will be difficult to get indexed. There are ways around this problem though. For example, instead of making the entire page a FLASH presentation, make the FLASH element smaller and use it as a feature on the page. This will leave you with plenty of room for descriptive text that the search engines can easily index.

Dealing with Dynamic Pages

Great improvements have been made by the search engines regarding indexing dynamic pages as in the past. There are still times when getting the content of dynamically generated pages indexed by search engines creates special challenges and having the ability to optimize those dynamic pages may become quite difficult. Many template based or canned out of the box web site solutions create dynamic pages. This will hinder your efforts greatly when trying to obtain top search engine placement.

File Formats

Beyond simple HTML files, search engines are now indexing other file formats such as PDF files, Word files, Excel files, etc. These files can be optimized to improve the results when search engines index them.

Framed Sites & Pages

Framed pages are built without search engine optimization in mind. Understanding how the search engines deal with these pages is important. Most optimization professionals (with good reason) will choose to avoid these types of pages entirely.

Java Script

Java Script can create problems when trying to get a page properly indexed. The solution can be as simple as offloading the Java Script to external text files to make your pages more easily indexed by the search engines.

What To Avoid

The primary purpose of search engines is to provide relevant results to their visitors. Some Webmasters try to trick the search engines into believing their page is relevant by using methods that the search engines discourage. It is important to understand what the search engines advise you not do.

Getting Professional SEO Help

If you have the budget for it, hiring a professional to perform, or help you with, your search engine optimization is highly recommended. A professional can help you learn more about improving your site and can save the time of having to learn everything on your own.

The services of a quality SEO is not going to be cheap. You get what you pay for in this field and don't expect someone offering a $39.95 service to be of any value at all.

A professional SEO will bring an incredible amount of knowledge to your project and you should expect to pay for this knowledge.