The Sandbox

Search engine optimization is a process designed to help a website appear highly in the search engine results pages for major search engines. Though nobody can control the search engines, there are several well-established techniques for making a website friendly to the spiders search engines use to find information. Good content, well-written and to the point, is the best way to attract attention from search engines as well as human visitors. But programming choices, selection of titles, tags, and navigation decisions can either bury the good stuff or package it for high visibility.

The following steps should be part of any serious search engine optimization campaign:

Keyword research. Any website can be #1 on Google for something. Pick a key phrase that nobody else wants, write up a little content, and submit it. Then wait a few weeks, search for your obscure phrase, and you may very well be the top listing. Or the only listing. You will also, likely be the only person searching for that phrase. If your optimization is to have any value, whatsoever, you must optimize for key phrases that are likely to be used by your desired audience. Each key phrase should show some level of current activity, must be relevant to the content on your website, and ought to the phrase used by the people you want to address.

Site programming review: Search engines are picky. Some won’t read urls with question marks, some won’t crawl navigation bars that use javascript. Few will read text that is contained in Flash files. None read text that is part of a graphic image. All have algorithms that check for tricky techniques that try and mislead them.

Placement: Key phrases have the greatest value if positioned in certain places. These are the spots the search engines look to see what a page is about. Title tags, header tags, and opening paragraphs are the most important. Phrases should also be used as anchor text for interior linking, especially text linking from page to page.

Submission: Once, submission was very important. Now search engine spiders are very good at finding things. Still, it can’t hurt to submit your site to the major search engines one time. More importantly, though, there are many specialized directories and search engines. Some of these may be relevant to your industry or field, and few are effective in finding content on their own. Discovering all the directory and specialty search engines on which should be listed is a time-consuming art.

Reporting: Once a campaign is underway, there are several types of stats that should be analyzed and reported on regularly. One is the ranking report, looking at all the important key phrases and seeing where your website ranks for each on the major search engines. Another are your site statistics. Not only do you need to know what kind of traffic you are getting, but you should know what search phrases they are using, where they are coming from, and what they are doing once they reach your website.

Link Building: Though similar in many ways to the submission process, link-building is usually described separately. Google uses an algorithm that relies heavily on the linking structure of the web. Therefore, the overall importance of a website is proportional to the type, relevance, and number of in-bound links. SEO specialists spend a lot of time identifying potential linkers, contacting them, and soliciting links. Often reciprocal links are requested. Part of link-building involves creating the kind of content that other website will want to link to.