Designers' Blog

Wikipedia defines SEO as “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the higher a site’s “page rank” (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.”

This is a very exhaustive subject, but I will try to define this in understandable terms.

The first thing we need to do is understand how search engines work. Popular search engines like Google or Yahoo have one basic goal with the results they display. To show what they believe are the most relevant websites to the user. These results are based on two different things, popularity of the website and the relevancy of the content.

For example, if someone types in ‘Boston Red Sox’, ESPN.com will be in the top 2 or 3 results and ahead of MikesBostonRedSoxFanClub.com. The latter site may have more content about the Red Sox than ESPN, but its lack of popularity will always position it behind ESPN.

First lets talk about content.

Here are a few pointers when developing content.

1. Ask yourself is “how would a customer search to find me?” Once you have that answer, that should be one of the main guidelines for the content of your website. If you provide a service, make sure you tie that theme into every page of your website. If you sell products, you will want to apply this same method to each product page or category.

2. Make sure your search engine friendly content is easy to read and understandable. This is where a lot of people new to SEO get in trouble. They fill there pages with so many “search-friendly” words and phrases, when visitors come to their site, they don’t understand what they are reading. While its great having visitors to your website, the more important thing is the conversion of the visitors into paying customers.

3. Don’t use graphics or images where normal HTML text will suffice. This is a simple one, but I am still amazed how often i see this. Search engines love text, text and more text. Search engines use something called ‘spiders’ that literally crawl your website looking for information to add to their search results. While pretty graphics with drop shadows may look nice (or not) spiders do not like them as much as text and will pass them on by. There is a method of using ALT tags with images, but for the purposes of this article, stick to text where possible.

4. Hire a professional web designer, or at the very least a consultant, to help you design your website. A web designer who is fluent in designing with SEO in mind, can create you a beautiful website that the search engines love.

So now that we have covered content, lets talk about popularity of your website.

There are 2 factors search engines look at to weigh the popularity of a website: Number of visitors and incoming links. The number of visitors, or traffic, is easy to understand, but what are incoming links. They are sites that link back to your website. Utilizing incoming links, or a link strategy as its called, can get very heavy and detailed. But again for the purposes of this article I will keep this light. The goal with a link strategy is to have as many links coming back to your website as possible. The search engines view these links as a strong sign of popularity. (ie. the more people linking to you, the more people think your site is relevant, which the search engines use as a gauge or popularity)

So there you have it, that is SEO in a very top level nutshell. While popularity holds more weight in the eyes of search engines, without good content, you won’t be found by the search engines or anyone else and thus won’t be that popular.

So create a good website with the visitor in mind and be sociable with other websites and companies, its the internet, its meant to be a social network.

posted on: Wednesday, January 28, 2009