Meridian Internet Marketing for SEO, PPC and Internet Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Explained

When someone searches for a term on the search engines there are often thousands or millions of results. For example, when I search for “ceiling fans” on Google, I get back about 2,000,000 results. The order of the results is based on the unique algorithms` (set of rules or instructions used in software) that each search engine uses.

The order or rank of the listing matters a lot because people generally the higher up your website appears in the listings, the more traffic you’ll get from people seeing and clicking on your listing.

Search engine optimization is a way to make your website appear higher up in the search results. The search engines results (sometimes called organic or natural results) are affected by a number of factors. Making changes on your website and the links to your website can change the factors that determine your ranking. That’s what search engine optimizing does.

The process of optimizing a website has several parts to it. One very important part is making sure your website uses the keywords that people are searching for. This applies to both the text on your website (the content) and the HTML code used to program your site. That’s why keyword analysis is a critical first step in optimization. Once you understand which keywords people are using to find your product or service you can incorporate them within your site and within the HTML code to ensure the search engines will find them.

Most major search engines use a kind of software called spiders (or searchbots) to read the contents of the millions of sites on the Web. Many websites have elements that make it hard for the spider to read their site. Things like frames or a Flash animation or text embedded in a graphic images can’t be read by a spider. Getting rid of those elements and making sure the site is easy to navigate for search engine spiders is another part of the optimizing process.

Links from third party websites to your site is another very important factor. Why? Search engines look at links from quality websites to your site as another measure of the site’s value. If you have a lot of external website pages linking to your pages, the search engines think that’s a good thing.

One type of external links that can be very valuable are search engine directories. These are the lists of different website categories (like “art & humanities,” or ‘business and economy”) that are found on Yahoo and other search engines. Some directories are free, other charge to include your website. In many cases the directories are an important source of links and are worth the investment.

Optimizing your website will almost certainly enhance your position in the natural search results. However, there are two caveats. The first is timing. It can take three to four months for the impact the changes you made to your website to show up in search results. The second is that despite the best efforts of a highly qualified SEO company, no one can guarantee a specific ranking position. After you optimize your site, your ranking will most likely improve, perhaps dramatically. But in the end, only the search engine itself can determine your specific position among the results.

As in most endeavors, for a few there is a dark side to search engine optimization. That is engaging in techniques that are prohibited by search engines to “cheat” your way to better rankings. Ethical SEO companies avoid these tactics, not only because it’s unethical, but because if the search engine catches on, your site can be permanently delisted from the search engine.