What Search Engine Optimization Means to You

If you have a business website, you want to attract as many customers as possible. That’s a no-brainer. But sometimes actually accomplishing this goal is anything but simple. With all the new rules and regulations put out by the major search engines, getting your site in front of internet users is often like navigating a very complex and technical maze. So we’ve broken down search engine optimization (SEO) into some manageable bites that so you can start with the basics.

Keywords

If you have run a keyword popularity report on Wordtracker.com looking for popular Search Engine Optimization terms and come up with a list of the most searched words in your field, you know that you need to include these words in your website in order to be found by the search engines. But where do you put them and how?

SEO, in Denver and elsewhere, used to be very simply a matter of placing keywords in prominent places so when a search engine does its searching, your site is found easily. Search engines operate with spiders, or web crawlers, that crawl through websites and find those that have words most closely matching the words in the search bar of the browser. Keywords in page titles, page descriptions, and what web designers call META tags were the ones that these spiders looked for most often.

Knowing this, web site designers began to include keywords at an alarming rate in text. You might have seen an example of this when you read an article that seemed to be incredibly redundant. The copywriter was using keywords on a large scale to attract the attention of web crawlers and therefore, get at the top of search results.

Today, this problem has been addressed by search engines like Google, who are looking for websites that are the most user-friendly. And user-friendly does not mean the same thing as keyword dense. So today, the key to keyword placement is natural. Don’t overload your copy with keywords, and don’t place keywords in your page titles or descriptions nor in your META tags that have nothing to do with the content of that particular page. You will not attract the latest form of web crawler.

Links

To achieve even more precise Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Denver businesses online have been known to join linking services or automatic link communities. The point of these activities has been to up their ranking on search engines by showing the web crawlers that they are linked to by dozens of other websites. The problem with this is similar to the keyword trend described above.

When search engines rank their results today, they look at a number of factors. They match keywords, yes, but they also look at the usability of the site by analyzing the sites that link to it. So if you sell patio furniture and you have links to your site from pool companies and gardening websites, this is a good sign that your site offers quality information recommended by other professionals.

If however, you have joined a linking service that simply sets up reciprocal links between you and random others, such as a dog groomer, the search engine’s spider will recognize this as simply a ploy to get better search results and not an indication of the usefulness of your site. So stick to legitimate links that actually provide a benefit to your customers.

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