SEO – First Look

Nowadays, we hear it everywhere we go. In many ways, SEO has become a key term in the Internet marketing world and for good reason - it really is invaluable. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it refers to several practices that are used to move your website up in Google’s search results.

Why would you want this? Generally, most Internet users consider the first results on any given search query as the most relevant to their search. Due to this paradigm, top results are visited by more people, giving those website more traffic and more income. 

SEO helps your website climb up through the ranks of every other website that targets the same keywords. We will focus today on Google, as it is the unequivocal leader in terms of online searching market share.

So How Does it Work?

The most basic part of SEO that must be understood is that search engines are counter-intuitive. They do not operate like humans, but work in a very mechanical way. While this may seem obvious, the real meaning of this concept is overlooked far too often.

Search engines rely heavily on text. They do not consider the hours put into a clever design or how you built the tension up with clever writing, but rather focus on Keywords and the structure (links) of your website.

Search engines “crawl” the Internet using tools known as Spiders (or Googlebots). These spiders “crawl” through your website, indexing, processing and calculating relevancy. Again, these sci-fi-esque creatures are much less sophisticated that what their name inspires – they look at text and code while ignoring Flash, Java, encrypted sections and frames.

Each page is indexed in a database, making it available as a search result when a relevant keyword is typed in by the end-user. When a search request comes in, Google calculates the most relevant pages and displays them as results.

Now that we know how it works, the next step is figuring out what we can do to make our website more relevant to our keywords. There are different factors to consider, but your keyword density and meta-tags are your first focus. There is no clear formula (the weight of each factor that is calculated by Google changes), but the best guideline for your texts is that they should include as many of your selected keywords without being ridiculous. Your text should clear, concise, and well written. Too many keywords are a definite red flag for every search engine – so stay clear.

Meta-Tags are used as pointers for search engines. These include the Meta-Keywords and Meta-Description. Meta-Keywords obviously refers to your keywords, so they should be included. Our previous article on Keywords discusses the topic of keyword management more deeply so please have a look if you have any doubts as to how to manage keywords more effectively. Here’s an example of Meta-Keyword code used for a fictitious online shoe retailer:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="orthopedic shoes, orthopedic, shoes, sandals, designer shoes">

Meta-Description is where you can get a bit more creative; it provides a brief overview of the document consisting of no more than 25 characters. This is an example of Meta Description code used for our previous example:

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Leading brands of orthopedic shoes">

Learning how to market yourself efficiently on the internet has a steep learning curve, but the information included in this article is the very first step towards establishing your website at the highest of ranks on your selected keywords.