Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of optimizing your website so that it will rank higher in natural (organic) search results. When someone types in a phrase that relates to your service or product, you want your website to appear (rank) as high on the first page of the search results as possible.

Search engines each have a set of rules they use to determine the relevance of your content with regard to a search phrase. Google evaluates over 200 factors in this process. This set of rules (or algorithms) isn’t published and is subject to constant tweaking. Ultimately, there are thousands of details involved in optimizing a site. Only someone who does this on a daily basis is able to recognize and take advantage of the myriad details that can increase a site’s ranking.

Website owners should beware of firms that employ “black hat” techniques to deliver quick results. It’s easy to be enticed by the prospect of a quick-fix. In reality, however, there must be balance to the optimization strategy. An approach that takes a site “too far, too fast,” can cause serious harm and result in the site being banned from the search engines.

It also easy to think that “if a little is good, a lot is better.” In reality, however, it is possible to over-optimize a site. Thousands of website owners had an unpleasant surprise in 2003 when Google launched what is now known as The Florida Update. At that time, Google modified its rules to weed out websites that had been over-optimized to manipulate their rankings; the result was a large number of websites being relegated to obscurity.

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Things That Affect Search Engine Rank Include:

The Domain Name / URL (Universal Resource Locator)

Search engines place a high value on the words in the domain name. Having a domain name like http://www.huntsville-bike-parts.com is far more likely to be found by someone looking for “Bike Parts in Huntsville” than “http://bobsbikes.com”. Note, dashes are seen as spaces by the search engine and are more effective than underscores in the domain name.  If I were buying a domain name, I would get both the dashed and non-dashed version to protect your website. You don’t want someone with a spam site using the dashed version of your URL. Lastly, you want every variation of your domain name (ie: huntsville-bike-parts.com and huntsvillebikeparts.com and huntsvillebikeparts.net) to resolve to the same website.

Navigational Structure

You want the path to any document to support the searchers query. If you are in Huntsville selling high performance bicycle parts, you probably want paths like “http://www.huntsville-bike-parts.com/lightweight-road-wheels/”, the default page in this section would typically be an index of all the racing wheels you carried and might be subdivided by brand “http://www.huntsville-bike-parts.com/lightweight-road-wheels/campagnolo/”. — The trick here is to understand what people are searching on the most and build pages that “support” the most popular search phrase.

The Page Name

The most important page on your website is the default page that is found when someone just types in your URL. Usually this page will have a name like index.html, but it may have another name or a different extension. The search engines will use this page to categorize your site and determine its relevancy. This page should be rich in text content and navigational links. If you want the search engines to figure out what your site is about, it is important that the page not be filled with flash images or use pictures for navigation. Just to repeat the point, dashes are seen as spaces by the search engine and are more effective than underscores in page names.

Page Title

The “title” of the page is at least as important as the page name itself. People used to be very keen on putting the company name in the tile, followed by actual title of the page, such as “Bob’ s Bike Shop – Road Wheels”.  This was a good approach especially if someone book marked the page because the bookmark would read  ”Bob’ s Bike Shop”. The problem is that this isn’t optimal in the current algorithms. Page titles should reflect the search terms you would want or expect from someone looking for the information contained in that page. Each page title should be unique. The title for the page in the previous wheel example might be ”Lightweight Campagnolo Racing Wheels “.  Again, the trick here is to understand what people are searching on the most and build titles that “support” the most popular search phrases and in the order they would most likely appear.

Page Content

Content is extremely important as it hopefully contains what the searcher is actually trying to find. The body of the page itself should contain the search phrase and variations on it. In the bicycle parts example, you might try to create compelling copy that contains the phrases “wheels for bicycles”, “bike wheels”, “lightweight wheels”, “road wheels”, “racing wheels for road bikes”. The search engines also pay more attention to tagged text. The H1 tag is believed to have the highest importance, but bolded text and linked text all come into play and should support key search phrases.