By A Web Design

SEO Basic Concepts Part 1

You can build a great looking website with excellent navigation and brilliant content, that's just half the job done.

If this site cannot be found by anyone then it simply lies unseen. This would be such a waste, especially for those who would benefit by accessing the website content but do not know how to find it on the Internet.

Finding Content On The Internet

When attempting to find content on the Internet, seekers normally query a search engine. ( Google is an excellent example of one )

Seekers normally key in a word ( or a set of words ) into the search engine's, search box, to tell the search engine what kind of content they are seeking. As shown in Diagram 1.

Google Search box with content
Diagram 1. Google's search box with keywords.

The search engine obligingly returns multiple pages of search results which contain links to websites that it believes should have the kind of content that is being sought. As shown in Diagram 2.

Google Search resutls page
Diagram 2. Google's search results page.

All that the seeker has to do is click on a link from among the multiple links displayed to get to the website and access its content.

All search engines in use today seem to operate as described above. The search engines could be Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves and a whole host of others.

Most search engines also display a short description of the website along with each link. Hence, seekers not only sees the link but can also read about a line or two describing the content available on the website.

Hence, the description displayed along with each link in a search engine's result page assumes importance. The closer the description is to what the seeker is looking for, the more likely it is that the link be clicked, enabling the visitor to arrive at the website.

Additionally, the closer the link to the top of the search results page, the higher is the likely hood that it is clicked on by the seeker. It is also possible that links displayed close to the very bottom of the search results page (i.e. the last three or four links )could get clicked on.

Having said this statistically, seekers are most likely to click on any one ( or all ) of the top six to eight links in the results page returned by the search engine.

Hence in addition to the brief description displayed along with the link, the position of the link on the results pages is quite significant to a seeker using a search engine.

Search Engine Optimization

S.E.O when used with reference to the Internet, is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization.

It is a process of website optimization that helps make that website especially interesting to search engines, which are constantly used to locate information on the Internet.

S.E.O is a process of improving the website's ranking in a search engine's results page.

Ideally the S.E.O process should enable a website's link to appear on the first page of the search results displayed by a search engine, mapped to specific key words that content seekers search for.

When this process is well thought through and executed not only does this enable the website to appear on the first page of a search engine's results but also have the website's link and description appear somewhere among the top ten results displayed.

Simply by being on the first page of a search engine's results ( and hopefully within the first five on the the page ) improves the volume and quality of traffic to a website driven to it via search engines tremendously.

Typically, the higher a site appears in the search engine's results page, the more visitors it will receive via the search engine.

Well thought through and executed S.E.O process gives a web site its Internet presence.

S.E.O considers how:

Search engines work
What people search for in search engines
How people search for something using a search engine

Using this data optimizing website pages by primarily editing their Content and HTML code to both increase it's relevance to specific keywords and to remove all barriers to the indexing activities of any search engine.

S.E.O The Technical Part of Web Marketing

Search Engine Optimization is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does require some technical knowledge – definitely a familiarity with HTML code.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this will not automatically guarantee the website top ranking in the search engine's results page but if you neglect the basic rules of S.E.O when crafting website pages, this will certainly adversely effect the position of the link to that page in search engine's result pages.

When applying a S.E.O process to website pages do set realistic goals – for example to get the page link displayed in let's say the top fifty results in a search engine's result page for a particular keyword, rather than trying to get the page link as number one for ten keywords in five different search engines. If realistic goals are set and met, then you will feel happier and a ton more satisfied with the result of applying the S.E.O process.

Now that we've established that page description and link position are two important issues in getting a website found via a search engine lets understand from where a search engine obtains the two line description displayed along with the link to website on its search result pages.

Google will be used on the example of a search engine in all the S.E.O material in these tutorials, but all search engines largely work the same when it comes to obtaining a web page description.

Google picks up the description it displays next to the link in its search result page from one of two places. Either from the HTML META tag - description in the HTML code itself. If for any reason there is no such tag then Google scans page content and takes a line or two from the page content itself for use a page description.

It always makes great sense to use the META tag - description in the HTML code to deliver a description of the website page to Google rather than let Google pick up what it thinks is correct.

The HTML META tag is normally enclosed within the >head< >/head< tags in an HTML page. Do take a quick look at the example below:

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of META tags available in HTML. If you would like to have a look at a listing of META tags and their attributes Click Here.