Home / Internet Business / SEO

What do you mean by Search Engine Optimization

By: S.Reeves Morris
Submitted: 2007-08-28 10:49:42
Print this article | Tell a friend | For publisher |

Rating:

 

Bringing as many customers as you can to your website is very important.

That's obvious. But sometimes actually accomplishing this goal is anything but simple. With all the new policies and rules put out by the major search engines, getting your site in front of internet users is often like navigating a very complex and technical maze. We’ve broken down search engine optimization (SEO) into a few digestive pieces so you can start with some basic information.

The Role of Keywords

If you have run a keyword popularity report on Wordtracker.com looking for popular Search Engine Optimization terms and compiled a list of the most often entered search terms in your line of business, you know that you need include these words in your website in order to be found by the search engines. But how should you do that?

SEO, in Denver and across the world used to be very simply a matter of placing keywords in prominent places so when a search engine does its searching, your site is found easily. Search engines operate with spiders, or web crawlers, that crawl through websites and find those that have words most closely matching the words in the search bar of the browser. Keywords in page titles, page descriptions, and what web designers call META tags were the ones that The search engine spiders looked for.

Knowing this, website designers began to include keywords at an alarming rate in text. You might have seen an example of this when you read an article that looked to be overly redundant. The content writer was using keywords over and over to attract the attention of web crawlers and therefore, get at the top of search results.

Today, this issue has been looked at by search engines like Google, who are looking for websites that are the most user-friendly. And user-friendly does not mean the same thing as keyword dense. So today, the key to keyword placement is natural. Don’t overload your copy with keywords, and don’t place keywords in your page titles or descriptions nor in your META tags that are not relevant to the content on that specific page. You will not attract the latest form of web crawler.

The role of Links

To achieve even more precise Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Denver businesses have tried joining linking services or automatic link communities. The motivation for making use of these activities has been to boost their ranking on search engines by showing the web crawlers that they are linked to from dozens of websites across the Internet. The problem with this is similar to the trend described above with keywords.

Today, search engines use a number of factors to rank their results. In addition to matching keywords, they also the usability of the site by analyzing the websites that link to it. So if you sell painting supplies and you have links to your site from art galleries and artist websites, this is a good sign that your site offers quality information recommended by other professionals.

If however, you have joined a linking service that simply sets up reciprocal links between you and random others, such as a pharmacist, the search engine’s spider will interpret this as a ploy to get more top search results and not an indication of the quality of your site. So use only legitimate techniques that actually offer value to your visitors.

This article was written by Steve Morris. Mr. Morris runs New Media, a Colorado web design Company located in downtown Denver, Colorado (http://www.NewMediaDenver.com). Mr. Morris is a highly respected Denver Search Engine Optimization specialist, and he constantly develops and stays current with all the latest SEO and Link Building Techniques.

Article source: Expert Articles