What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Putting your web site online is not enough to get anyone to visit it. To get people to visit your website, you need to drive traffic to it by various means, the most popular of which is through search engines. Millions of search queries pass through search engines every day. If you were lucky enough to have your website appear at or near the top of search engine result pages (SERPs) then search engines will start to be driving traffic to your lucky website.
The importance of having your web site appear at the top of SERPs and its relationship with the amount of traffic you get has lead to the practice of trying to get ones website up and up in the SERPs. This practice is called: search engine optimization (SEO).
Early Days of SEO
SEO is closely tied with how search engines function. In the past, search engines relied on the frequency of keywords in a given document to determine its relevance to a search query. For instance, if you were searching using the search query "Java tutorials" a page with those keywords repeating many times will get a higher position in the SERPs.
This high dependence of search engines on keyword frequency in web pages lead many SEOs to try and trick search engines in order to get a high position in SERPs for specific keywords. In the web page, they just repeated the keywords they wanted over and over again after one another. You might have found a page with hundreds of repetitions of the phrase "java tutorials" next to one another! Sometimes, they even gave such repeating text a color that is close to or identical to the background color so that it would be invisible to people visiting the web page and only search engines would see it! This technique was one of many early black hat methods (unethical practices for optimizing a website).
Search Engines Today
Search engines today have gone a far way from their early days. Though not perfect yet, they are way better than they had been a couple of years back. As practitioners of black hat optimization methods went further with their malicious practices spawning search engines with their sites, search engines fought back ferociously improving their ranking and matching algorithms.
One clever search engine was Google. They relied mainly on a new method for ranking the importance of a website by determining how many other websites link back to it. If many web sites linked to your site, then your site must be important, that is how PageRank, Google's ranking technology, works. Not only is the importance of your site determined by the number of back links it has, but also by the quality of those links, that is: the importance of those sites that are linking to you. A link to your web site in the Yahoo! Directory will boost your PageRank, because Google sees the Yahoo! Directory as a very important website. Moreover, a link in the Open Directory (DMOZ, which is a directory run by volunteers in the spirit of the open source movement, and was initiated by Netscape) will also boost your PageRank, for again Google sees DMOZ as an authoritative website of high value.
After Google's great success with its new model for determining the importance of a web page based mainly on other web sites linking to it, the other search engines started to follow similar methods. Now Yahoo! Search and MSN Search both use back links as a main source of determining the importance of web pages. Search engines today have gone a long way from the past, and their search results have improved dramatically.
Future of Search Engines
Search engines are getting better and better by the day. Despite the increased efforts of search engine spammers using new as well as old black hat methods to get an unfair advantage on other websites, search engines are fighting back with better and better algorithms that are able to determine the real value of a web page and not fall pray to abuse by malicious spammers.
SEO Techniques
The best way to bring your website to a high position in SERPs for relevant search queries is to use white hat SEO methods. This is the best long term strategy to avoid a search engine completely removing your site from their index or penalizing your site for using a black hat method like the ones mentioned above and others similar to them. Follow the few tips below to get higher ranking for your website from search engines:
- Content
- Write many useful information rich pages.
- Regularly add new content to your website.
- Navigation
- Use a well organized navigation structure of text links.
- Add a site map.
- Links
- Get your site listed in popular online directories.
- Encourage others to link to your website.
Forget about submitting your new website to hundreds of search engines, that will do you little good. It is enough to submit the URL of your web site to the most popular search engines, namely: Yahoo!, Google and MSN. Today, it is even unnecessary to submit your website at all, as search engines will crawl your website with their spiders and index it anyway as long as other good sites are linking to it.
Selecting Keywords
The tips mentioned above will ensure you get a higher ranking by search engines. Now in order to get more traffic, you must target good keywords. Good keywords are the keywords that are used more often by people as search queries when they are searching for information on the web using search engines.
The more a keyword or keyphrase is used by people as a search query, the higher its value becomes. But sometimes a keyword that has a high frequency of searches also has a large number of web sites appearing in the search results for that keyword. In this case, although the keyword seems promising given the high number of searches it receives, yet the presence of a large number of web pages appearing in the search results makes your chances of climbing up near the top of the SERPs a very tough job. You will simply be competing with an enormous number of sites, a job you will never win unless your site is incredibly good and popular.
The best approach is to aim for keywords that many people are using as search queries but at the same time that not many websites appear for in SERPs. If we call the keyword value as V, the number of search queries for that keyword as Q and the number of web pages that appear in search results for that keyword as R, then a simple formula for determining the value of a given keyword could be: V = Q/R. This means that the value of a keyword is determined by dividing the number of search queries it is used in by the number of web pages that appear in SERPs when that particular keyword is used as the search query.
A better and slightly more complex formula for calculating the value of a keyword was developed: V = Q^2 / R. That is, instead of simply dividing the number of queries by the number of results to arrive at the value of a keyword, the number of queries is first raised to the power of 2 then divided by the number of results to arrive at the value of the keyword. This is a much better formula for determining the value of a keyword. Other variations of this formula include raising Q to powers of more than 2. The more confident you are in your search engine optimization abilities and in your website, the higher the power you can use for Q in the formula. This makes sense, because you are giving more importance to the number of queries than the number of web pages competing with you when you are more confident that you can easily compete with those other web pages. If you are a new comer to SEO, then Q raised to the power 2 would probably be enough for you, as still your SEO skills will not be that strong, so you better take more seriously the number of competing web pages.
Using Keywords
Now that you have determined good keywords to use, here is how to actually optimize your web page for selected keywords or keyphrases so that it would have a better chance of appearing up in search engine result pages when such when those keywords are used in a search query.
Search engines give special importance to the following:
- Page title.
- H1, H2 and H3 tags.
- First paragraph.
- Density of keywords.
Including your keywords in the parts mentioned above will increase the likelihood of search engines serving your page up in their SERPs when those keywords are used in a search query. Density of a keyword means how many times the keyword appears in the web page relative to the number of times other words appear. Keyword density is a tricky issue, and should not be overused or else a search engine may penalize your web page considering it as a way of spamming. The best thing is not to overuse your keywords in your web page, but use them in a natural way. An easy test for that is to ask yourself if a human reads your page, will it look natural or will the over-repetition of some keywords feel strange? This simple test will let you know if you have been overusing the keywords making for an overdose of keyword density that could get search engines to berry your website down to the bottom of their search result pages or perhaps even vomit it out of their indexes all together.
It is worth mentioning here that search engines no more pay attention to the HTML "keywords" meta tag. This meta tag was important in the past, but due to wide abuse by black hat advocates, search engines no longer pay any attention to it.
And Finally ...
The search engine optimization world is a large one. Understanding it and being able to act upon it can spell the difference between a popular website receiving loads of traffic every month and another dead site gathering dust at the corner of cyberspace with not a single visitor brought to it by search engines.
Some companies hire SEO consultants to help them get more traffic to their site by getting better search engine ranking for their websites. SEO has dramatically changed from its early days and is relying more and more on the quality of textual content and on website popularity measured through links to it.
Links
You will find these SEO tips by Google useful. In addition, do not forget to visit their webmaster guidelines page. You may also like to visit this page by WordTracker to find out more on how a keyword value is calculated.
The most popular online directories to add your website to are: Yahoo!, DMOZ and Zeal and the most popular search engines to submit your new website to are: Yahoo!, Google and MSN.