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 What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is quite simply the technique of making your site appear more relevant and more prominent than any other in its field. Every hour of every day the major search engines scour the web, cataloguing its content and ranking that content in order of relevance. Search engine Optimization harnesses this by activity by predicting and analysing words and phrases that your customers are most likely to enter as search terms in engines such as Google. These search Optimization terms are then built seamlessly into the fabric of your site in positions that search engines are most likely to favour.

Search Engine Optimization and Keywords

Because each search engine compiles its rankings in a slightly different manner, and each has different, and often highly complex, sets of rules, the art of constructing pages so they ‘please’ a search engine is a delicate one.

The main consideration is keyword density, or more simply, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a page. Most search engines will also weight those words according to their position; so a keyword appearing in a heading will carry more value than one appearing in the body of the text, and one near the top of the page more value than one at the bottom

Keyword Selection

Choosing the right set of keywords is fundamental to search engine Optimization . If too vague or broad a set is chosen the number of hits generated by a search engine will be vast (ask Google to search for ‘computer’ and it will find 1,650,000,000 relevant pages) yet if the set is too narrow, the chances of your prospective customers entering that precise term are small indeed. Identifying keywords that strike that balance is therefore, one of the most skilled elements of search engine Optimization.

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?

Search engine Optimization, or SEO, is quite simply the technique of making your site appear more relevant and more prominent than any other in its field. Every hour of every day the major search engines scour the web, cataloguing its content and ranking that content in order of relevance. Search engine Optimization harnesses this by activity by predicting and analysing words and phrases that your customers are most likely to enter as search terms in engines such as Google. These search Optimization terms are then built seamlessly into the fabric of your site in positions that search engines are most likely to favour.

Search Engine Optimization and Keywords

Because each search engine compiles its rankings in a slightly different manner, and each has different, and often highly complex, sets of rules, the art of constructing pages so they ‘please’ a search engine is a delicate one.

The main consideration is keyword density, or more simply, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a page. Most search engines will also weight those words according to their position; so a keyword appearing in a heading will carry more value than one appearing in the body of the text, and one near the top of the page more value than one at the bottom.

Finding a Balance

Nor does simply packing a page with keywords does not help search engine Optimization, indeed most search engines are designed to spot this practice and to penalise those sites that use it. More importantly though, sentences packed with search Optimization terms soon become tiring and tedious to read, and it takes skill to weave them into a site without alienating the very reader you seek to attract.

Search Engine Optimization and Meta Tags

Meta tags are words embedded in a page and that do not display on a browser. Originally their purpose was to simplify the job of search engines, however they have been so abused in the past that many search engines consider meta tags to be of low value, and some ignore meta tags completely.

Search Engine Optimization and Links

Search engines also consider the links on your pages, and the links to those pages. These are given different levels of importance depending on their nature.

Outbound links refer to pages outside of your own site. As these are within the site-author’s control, they are given the lowest ranking, but still count towards the overall search engine Optimization score. Intrasite links are inbound links from other pages within the same site. Once again, because they are under control of the site author, they are given lower importance, Inbound links are links from external sites and are the most important as far as search engine Optimization is concerned simply because the site author has no direct control.

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