Search Engine Optimization Basics

Unfriendly Search Elements

Search engines have a limited amount of information types that they can actually see. For instance if your site has an image on it that has the heading "The Worlds Greatest Widget", the search engine has no idea what your graphic says. All it sees is that there is an image file loading on the page. Likewise for Macromedia Flash files, audio, animation and some dynamic content. If your site incorporates these elements as a primary means to deliver content that would otherwise be text, you are hindering the search engines abiblity to read the information.

There are certain ways to get around some of these limitations. For instance your HTML editor should allow you to enter whats known as an ALT Tag on your image. You have probably seen these before and not even known what they are. Before an image loads on the page sometimes you will see a few words describing what the image is or what it contains. These are text references that are linked to the image in the HTML code of the page. These tags are the primary way a search engine can tell what an image is. By using these tags and including your keywords in them you greatly increase the search engines ability to index your site. Back to out illustration earlier, I would suggest that if it is possible to use a large, bold font for you "Worlds Greatest Widget" line that is better than using an image with an ALT Tag, the reason is that search engines assign a higher value to large text at the top of your page than to an ALT Tag of an image.

Ins and Outs of Search Friendly Text

Search engines all have their own techniques to ranking pages but these are some great things to do that will help your rankings and are beneficial to site visitors when properly implemented. As I mentioned about engines give a higher rank to larger font sized and bold words. The premise is that if you have a heading at the top of your page that talks about baseball and the word baseball is very large and used in a heading format, the engine will assume your page has a good bit to do with baseball. Search engines also give higher values to words that are in bold throughout the site. When the engines index your site they work of a concept called keyword density. The idea behind keyword density is to determine how many times a word occurs in a page. For instance, if you have the term baseball occurring 15 times on my page that will increase the chance of being listed under baseball. Beware many engines look for suspicious keyword density and will consider it spamming if your keyword appears too many times. You cannot just submit a site with the word baseball 200 times and expect to get a good listing. Infact many site can intelligently determine if it is used in a sentence and sentence structure, to some degree. Do not try to get around these protocols, they are very good and are in place to ensure the search engine is serving up relevant content. Remember it's the engines job to deliver relevant sites to searcher.

One other topic worth mention is properly worded Title Tags. These tags are the titles that the HTML page has and also what is displayed when the page is bookmarked. Search Engines give a certain weight to the words in the title. When developing your page you will want to incorporate your keywords into the page title. Many times the engines will use the title as part of the search listing in the engine itself. So use a title that will represent your content and be worded well. Do not use keyword spamming on this as the engines can detect if you simple repeat the same keywords over and over.

Another item to keep in mind is that the engines like to see a decent amount of content. If an engine sees 50 words on a page it will likely not rank very well. On average you should aim for 200-300 words on a page. This will ensure the engines deem your site informative. The proper balance between the amount of content, keyword density and use of bold large headings with your keywords will give you a good chance when it comes to optimizing text.

How to Organize Your Site

Search Engines actually look at how your site is organized and how your pages link together is very important. When designing your site you should title each page using your keywords. For instance, if your page is on farming you will want to name your actual HTML page "farming.html". Using this technique search engines will actually use the page name to help determine relevancy over generic names like "page1" or "summary".

In closing these are some of the concepts and ideas you must keep in mind when developing you site. Look at search optimization as a test you would take in school. This test has many questions that if you answer them correctly will add up to a good score. This score will relate to a higher position in the search engines. If you learn these techniques and learn to use them while you are building a site, you will have a much better chance of getting a good listing.