SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing a website to achieve high rankings in the search engines. The way this is done is by optimizing your site for particular search terms or keyword phrases that are designed to give your site good rankings in MSN, Yahoo and hopefully in the mother of all modern search engines; GOOGLE! So… what does all this mean?
If you want to find something online I guess you go to Google or Yahoo and do a search, right? If so, you will expect to find something relevant to the search term you entered. To ensure that the results you get are as relevant as possible for the search term you entered the search engines have developed a lot of great algorithms to make sure only the most relevant results show up within the few first pages.
If you search for cars then you are not interested to find something about neither brownies nor boats. In for order for for instance Google to know what is relevant to your search they need to know which websites feature what you are looking for. When search engines index pages they store information about the pages in order to generate the most relevant results by using a combination of different ranking factors such as page rank, link popularity, content and other off- and –on page optimization factors.
In order not only to get your website indexed but also ranking high for relevant search terms your mission is to build your pages so the search engines index your pages quickly and accurately. They key is to give the search engines what they are looking for and keep them happy by optimizing your pages according to the ideas or standards provided by i.e. Google. One of these “ideas” is to have a Google site map – or a google friendly xml site map – on your website. You must then create an account with Google and tell them where your xml site map is located. This way they can index your site quicker and currently it is crucial to rank well. Do this right and you will make Google happy, surfers are happy because they find what they are looking for and you will be happy because you will get free targeted traffic to your website :-)
To put it short there is one word that is crucial: Relevance. Don’t use black hat tricks to fool the search engines because these tricks will get your sites banned by google and the other search engines. Just give the surfers and Google what they are looking for and eventually you will rank well if you do things right.
Search Engine Optimization is so much more than just creating a few meta tags and submitting your URL to a few search engines. This maybe was all there was to it a few years back but things change and they change fast.
There are many more factors than the ones listed above that are playing major parts in ranking in the search engines but these were some of the most important ones.
Some other factors that play a major part in your sites rankings are inbound links and the rank of the sites that provide the links, listings by relevant directories, and of course the quality of the content on your own site
How well are you doing now? See www.pageranksite.com to see.
