A brief explanation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Let’s say that your business’ website is represented by a red tomato. Having a website that is search engine optimized means that your website has been prepped to interact nicely with webcrawlers and spiders that work for the search engine. If your website can show the search engine that your tomato is the right one to pick, then when someone searching for specific information – types in certain keywords, the red tomato (your website) will be shown and can share its delicious, ripe, warm, summery essence with the most people who are searching for red tomatoes. Having a website that is not optimized is like blindly picking stuff that may be green and tasteless, then serving it to visitors.
Ideally, you want your website to show up for people who are searching for your business’ information. Optimizing your website is like giving the red tomato the right tags so that it shows web bots and spiders, “Hey, this is the one to pick!” thus, when real people (potential customers or people searching for information) search for your website, they will be able to see and access your information.
With summer finally arriving, it’s the best analogy I can think of.
Search engine optimization helps people arrive to your website after entering a search term in a search engine. Here’s a link to Google if you’d like to see the popular search engine. After the searcher hits enter, a listings of what the search engine things is relevant is supplied. There is a very complicated process that occurs when this happens.
There are a couple of basic things to understand.
- 1. Every business, blog or website wants to be at the top of search rankings. The competitions is fierce. There are over 8 billion websites out there. This number grows every day. If you make a website, even if you put in all the right keywords, your whole site will be ranked with all the other websites that have similar words. (This is where page rank comes in.)
2. Search engines understand that all websites ideally would like to be at the top and have a complicated system of creating a ranking websites by using (and constantly refining) over 2,000 different interrelated algorithms. It is a detailed, complicated and secretive process.
3. The online world is constantly changing. Websites are created and websites disappear. How your website ranks with other sites is dependent upon highly dynamic factors some of which are: which website link to your site, the rank of the websites linking to your site, which sites you link out to, how long your website has been around, size of the site, freshness of content… etc.
Search engines, mainly Google, have risen to the top because they are good at what they do. What at first was an odd name that was made fun of, is now a growing empire and has become a household verb. How many times have you heard, “Just google it.”
When you search for a term, the search results are based off of the text that is typed into the search form. Google quickly searches its massive daisy-chained database and within a few milliseconds, will show you relevant results. It is able to do this because it has an army of bots or spiders are constantly crawling and indexing websites on the internet, recording, categorizing and analyzing the text, incoming and outgoing links, alt text, age, size, tags, and many other aspects of website. They don’t always present exactly what you’re looking for, but they do a pretty good job.
Understand that all search engines are text-based. If the text does not exist on your website, it can never be listed and found. Search engines match exact text entered into the search form and matches it with with text on websites that it has crawled. For example, let’s say that a glass sculptor artist based out of Boulder has a website. The glass sculptor has a beautiful looking website, but the pictures are not labeled, and there is no text that indicates where he is located. If someone searches for “Boulder Glass Sculptor” his website might not even come up in the listing. If, however, the exact text, “Colorado Glass Sculptor” is in the site, and someone searches for the exact text “Colorado Glass Sculpting”, then the site has a chance of being listed in the search results. If the text does not exist in the website, it will not be listed as a result in certain keyword searches.
Having a website is important for a business. It is the global public billboard that is easily accessible from an internet enabled device, whether a laptop, desktop or phone. Simply having a website does not mean that your site will show up in web searches, as there is a lot of competition. When you have a website, you ultimately want it to perform to its goal, whether that is bringing people to your place of business, book vacation tours, order stuff, or generate awareness or income. None of this can happen if your website can not be found. This is why search engine optimization is important.
Have you ever entered in a search string of words only to find that it has returned a listing of worthless websites that don’t have the relevant information that you were searching for? In the past this occurred because the offending website may have listed keywords of, say, different cities that exists, and city you typed in just happens to be in that list? This happens less frequently now because – 1. There is more competition, and – 2. Search engines like to be good at what they do, and do not like to be tricked. Google constantly refines and improves their algorithms to exclude sites that use keyword stuffing simply to bring more traffic to their sites. In other words, they have included algorithms to exclude websites that try to fool search engines. In some cases these sites have been dropped from the index. (This is a very bad thing.)
In order to find out what search terms people are searching for, run a keyword search through a keyword search tool that shows what terms and combinations people are using around various subjects. You can learn what different combinations of words they are putting together and at what frequency. If your website or business deals with certain keywords, create a site with broad keywords that will increase your chances of being listed. Once the relevant keywords are identified, they need to be placed in the website in a way that gives the viewer relevant and helpful information. Where you place the words within your website is also important.
Meta tags or meta keywords, and a description have a mixed reviews as to the relevance that google gives to them. Websites are made up of two main areas: the head and the body. The head section is invisible to people visiting the website when seen through a browser, but is read by the search engines.
If you think about what you do, and try to put yourself in the shoes of someone looking for information, try to think of what keywords other people would use to find your type of information. Help them find the red tomato!