Using SEO to Improve Your Web Site

SEO is the name for the adjustments and additions you do to make your web site more attractive to search engines. Search engines sort sites by algorithms that consider a page's content, meta tags, URL, incoming links, and site history to decide how important and relevant a page is. How well the page does determines how prominently it is featured in the search engine results when a browser searches for a given keyword. Pages that use these principles to do well when measured by search engines' algorithms are called "SEO friendly." Most browsers do not look past the first page or two of results, so it is absolutely essential to your web site's success to get into the top ten or twenty results for the keywords most important to your site.

How do you use SEO to rise higher in the search results? First, you select the keywords to target. Ranking well for a general term like "coffee" is everyone's dream, but almost impossible to do; you will probably find that the more specific the keywords, the easier it is to rank well. "Coffee beans" is a more specific keyword, but "Blue Mountain coffee beans" is better, and "roasted Blue Mountain coffee beans" is excellent. If competition is high enough, you may need to add even more terms to the keyword phrase, such as "roasted Blue Mountain coffee beans Boston."

Once you have a list of keywords, retool each page to target one keyword apiece. The best practice is to put the keyword in the page's file name, title, and description meta tag. (Ignore the keyword meta tag, which was so heavily abused that it is now irrelevant to SEO.) The keyword should also appear in any anchor text on links pointing to the page, and should appear in the body of the page a certain number of times. The number of times a keyword should appear in the body is a delicate and tricky part of search engine optimization; to prevent abuse, search engines change their algorithms frequently, so one year the most SEO friendly percentage of keyword appearances is 10%, then the percentage drops to 6%, then to 4%. Read reliable SEO forums and keep up to date on the latest SEO developments to know how often to mention a keyword in each of your web pages.

When you are done with the page content, consider your page design. Is your design code light, or will search engine spiders have to crawl through masses of unfriendly code to get to the content? If the code is now at the top of the page, can you relocate it after the page body? Are pages linked with Javascript and Flash, or do you have plain HTML links to and from each page? Do you have a sitemap that spiders can read?

As you can see, making your site SEO friendly is not an abstruse, magical process. You only need to write content that your readers will enjoy reading, and add a few minor search engine optimization details intended for search engine spiders. Read search engine blogs and spend some time on reliable forums, and soon you will know everything you need to make your site SEO friendly.