By Zach Townsend
This is the process of making your website more attractive to search engine robots in order for the search engines to list you higher up in their indexes. For example, let's say you've set up a website about things to do while in France. Just by creating your website, search engines are not neccessarily going to find out about it unless another website provides a link to your site. So, to get the search engines to 'look' at your site you first need to get another site to link to yours, or you can manually submit your site to the search engine in question. Neither way guarantees that a search engine will look at your site, but in practice it does usually. The manual submission page to let Google know about your site is at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Many optimizers consider it better to have some good incoming links and let a search engine find you rather than manually submitting it, as a search engine may place more importance on your site if it's algorithms indicate it found you due to your content being of value rather than you forcing the search engine to index it. Either way, it's certainly quicker to manually submit your site. You can either submit to each search engine individually, or use a tool like SubmitNet to automate the process for you.
Once a search engine robot finds your site, it then begins the process of indexing. This is where the robot, which acts a bit like a normal human browsing your site, but a bit more thoroughly, checks every page on your site and follows all the links. This process may take days or even weeks depending on the size of your site. Each robot has it's own way of trawling through a site, and will use the information on each page as input to the search engine algorithm to enable the search engine to decide how it should categorise your site, and how important it is. The key to understanding how search engine optimization works will help you to maximise the chance that someone typing relevant words into the search box of a search engine will find your site. Obviously, if there are over a thousand sites about the same subject as yours, and you do no optimisation, then the search engines may show you near the end of the results selection, and the chance of a person finding your site is slim.
In the example we've chosen of a website about things to do in France, it's vitally important that the search engines correctly categorise your site. Is it a travel site, or is is designed more for people who live in France? Think of all the phrases that people who would potentially want to see your site, might type into a search engine. Maybe they would type "things to do in France"? Then think laterally. Phrases such as "cycling in France", "attractions in France", "French attractions" and so on. Always think from the viewpoint of your potential visitors. Once you have a list of phrases, then you can begin to optimise your site. Search engines place a lot of importance in actually finding the 'searched for' phrase in the page, so although your website is about 'things to do in France' and you know that cycling is an obvious activity, the search engine doesn't. Unless your page makes specific reference to "cycling in France", it won't categorise you as such. You are basically trying to get the search engine to show your site for a whole bunch of relevant keywords and phrases. Irrelevant keywords are unlikely to help, because if visitors click onto your site and it doesn't immediately appear relevant to the term they were searching for, they will likely close the window immediately. (More on keyword selection later)
Just including relevant terms on the page however is not enough. Try to make each page specific to a narrow subject, that way the search engine is more likely to view the page as important to that subject. So, for example, dedicate an entire page or more specifically to cycling in France. Now we can talk about the other factors that can help with gaining a search engine's attention. Why not call the page in question "cycling in France.htm"? Apart from making it easy for you to remember what the page is about when looking at a directory of pages, it can clarify the purpose of the page to the search engine. Each valid page should also have a title, and it's historically common to include META information such as a description and keywords in the head of each page. To fit in with the purpose of the page you could make the page title "Cycling in France" and include a description such as "Information about cycling in France, Places to stay and visit."
None of this information is visible to someone viewing your page, although the search engine may show the description or title in the search results which may influence a potential visitor as to whether they should visit your site of not. The META data shown above is unlikely to influence how well your site ranks, but it does insure that each page is described acurately by the search engine. Remember to change this information for each page in your site. Simply, having the same title and description duplicated on every page will miss you the oportunity of getting the search engines to give the correct importance to each page.
Another factor which can help is in the actual choosing of a domain name. Calling your domain www.placestovisitinfrance.com is likely to help more than www.mikes-great-french-site.com. If www.placestovisitinfrance.com is gone, check for derivatives such as www.places-to-visit-in-france.com or even www.france-visit-places.com. The more descriptive the domain may influence the search engine and will also help a potential visitor to identify the purpose of your site before they visit. Avoid choosing a domain that is too long, as there is little chance that a visitor will remember it if they want to return. Also avoid mis-spellings as a visitor will most likely forget and spell it correctly. Including too many keywords in the domain or page name, e.g. www.cycling-bike-bicycling-velo-in-france-french-visit-places.com is considered spamming and apart from the fact it looks unprofessional, it may get your site excluded from a search-engines' results.
Linking
For the robots to correctly index every page, it's important to ensure that every page is correctly linked to using a clear menu system. Robots are getting increasingly adept at following links of diffent types, but as it stand, it's still better to keep links to plain HTML links such as Search-Engine Optimization rather than using Javascript or other means to create a link. Menus created in Flash are now able to be traversed by some robots, but you are potentially limiting your chances of being highly ranked, the more complicated you make the menu system. If you must use images for links, consider duplicating your links in plain text, because although your page may have an image that shows the words "Search-Engine Marketing" and a visitor will see it, a robot cannot, and will not associate any text with that link. Whilst on the subject of images, always include a tag for each image which will give a description to the robot of that image. The title="picture of car" tag will show your text "picture of car" when a visitor hovers their cursor over the image, and the alt="picture of car" will show the text if for any reason the picture cannot actually be displayed. Some browsers are set up to not show images, and of course some of your visitors may be visually impaired and using audio browsers which will be able to 'speak' the picture if you use these tags correctly. Aside from this, the more indication you can give to the robot of what the picture is about is likely to help.
The text you use in the link is also important. By using the self-explanatory term "Search-Engine Optimization" in the link, it's obvious to visitors and the search engine robot, that by following this link they can expect to find a page dealing with the subject you've specified. If you used a link like Another interesting article the visitor would see the text "Another interesting article" which they may or may not take your word for, and the robot would view that as too unspecific, lessening the page's appeal to the search engine.
A technique to increase the value of a page is to have other links from other pages pointing to that particular page. For example, if you had another page about website marketing, you might talk about the various techniques involved. Somewhere on the page you could mention search engine optimization and include a link to your search engine optimization page. This not only provides another relevant link to your page, but also helps a visitor to find the page quickly if they are interested in that subject.
External Links
Most search engines consider websites with lots of links from other websites to be more important. This can affect how highly your site is ranked my the search engine. Althought the practice of link exchange has resulted in thousands of sites with pages of irrelevant links, it can still help if you have links from relevant pages on relevant sites. For example, a link on a page about cycling tours on another site, to your page about cycling in France could add value. Usually you would be expected to reciprocate the link, although it's usually better to link from a different page that the one with the incomming link.
Keywords
When you are looking for phrases and keywords to include in your page, it can sometimes help to consider what phrases search engine users are actually using. Here are some tools which show other similar words.
Espotting Keyword Generator
Overture Keyword Generator
Wordtracker
Avoid using these tools to fill your page with a list of keywords, visable or hidden, as this is considered by the search engines to be 'spamming' and can result in you being excluded totally from their results.
For the important headings on a page, use the tag, as this indicates to the robot that this is a primary heading, and so it will place more importance on the text in an h1. If you don't like the default font and size you can change it preferably using CSS.
Validation
When you have completed a page it's often worth validating the page to ensure that the HTML is correct, so that the page doesn't give unexpected results on other browsers or to the robots. Remember, your visitors probably use a different version browser to you, and that could affect the look of a page. To validate your page, try the HTML Validation at http://validator.w3.org/
Conclusion
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science unless you work in the algorithm design department of a search engine company. Exactly how they rank sites and decide who should appear in the top results changes regularly as they improve their algorithms. It also takes time for a new site to be indexed, and can take months even for a well optimized site to appear in a search engine's results. So this form of marketing does take a lot of patience, and if you need quick results then you may be better off considering other search engine marketing techniques such as PPC.
If you pay for a professional to optimize your site, there are no guarantees, particularly on competative keywords such as 'insurance'. If they ask for a payment up front, with a promise to get you a certain ranking then you should probably think again. High rankings are possible, but it's more likely with niche keywords.
About the Author: Zach Townsend is a freelance internet marketer and database bod. You can contact him via
http://www.zdt.co.uk or http://www.marbellawebdesign.com
Source: www.isnare.com
