Search Engine Optimization 101

Search Engine Placement and Optimization

One of the biggest misconceptions made about search engines is that they owe us webmasters traffic. A search engine is nothing more than a business that needs to make money. They provide a valuable service to the public and in turn they reap large sums of money from advertisers who want some of their traffic. That's really all there is to it.

What search engines need is traffic. They need all those millions of people running queries on the engine each and every day. Those are the people that search for free but also click through ads and buy from advertisers which makes a search engine's advertising services worth money.

To keep people searching, search engines need to have relevant and highly desirable results. People need to be able to find what they are looking for. If they can't they'll just use a different search engine. If they can they will come back and search again.

With all this in mind there are basically three things search engines look for in web sites. Relevant content, quality content, and unique content. If you want to rank high in the search engines you have to be a specialist in your chosen field. If your field is too broad then it becomes a battle between you and 160 million other companies with huge advertising budgets. If you optimize your site for really specific keywords like "web design portland oregon" instead of "web design" you will find yourself getting a few hundred searches a month instead of being buried in the search engines past the 4 billionth result.

Search engines use special formulas called algorithms to decide which web pages are more important than others for certain keywords or phrases. These algorithms have actually become fairly complex and even down right smart. They are designed to filter out and even penalize sites that employ unethical search engine optimization methods such as keyword stuffing and link spamming.

One of the main things most major search engines use to tell if your site is important is link popularity. If a site that a search engine considers a good solid site on relatively the same subject as yours links to your site it is considered a sort of vote for your site. The more votes the better. However you should never buy links from sites and always be very careful about trading links with another site. Some search engines look for purchased links and will actually dish out penalties for such tactics.

If you ever link to a penalized site that a search engine considers to be using unethical or spammy SEO methods then you could be penalized or even banned also. Like I mentioned before, search engines are very concerned with keeping their results as relevant as possible. If you engage in any method designed to trick search engines into thinking that your site is more important than it really is then when you get penalized or banned please don't whine.

When designing a page do careful keyword research to find the right search phrase. Typically I pick phrases that have at least 200 searches a month via the Overture keyword tool and have less than 200,000 results in Google.

After picking out your target phrase use it once near the front of the title and meta description, once in the meta keywords tag, once in an H1 tag near the front of your page, once in the title and alt tags of your first image, and at least once in bold or underlined and one to six times in link text.

Make sure the page you're optimizing has its own, unique, high-quality, relevant content and that you use your keyphrase a few times through the text naturally. Not too much though or you risk being seen by the search engines as spam. If someone can look at your page and tell you're trying to bolster your results for a particular keyphrase then you've gone too far. Web pages should be designed first and foremost for the visitor. After all this is exactly what search engines are looking for.

Last thing on the list for this article is a few don'ts. Don't hide text with frames, CSS, images, etc. Don't design pages for search engines instead of people. Don't cloak pages (show different pages for search engines than people). Don't hide text on same color background. Don't make text too small.