Search Engine Optimization by SEO expert Karen Vertigan

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing traffic to a website by increasing the ranking and position of that website. It is not about who has the prettiest site with the most bells and whistles.

Sometimes the most gorgeous websites can have terrible rankings because they are not optimized properly, while a site that is basically simple and even horrible in appearance gets really high ratings. What is the principal difference?

There are some simple rules of thumb that you can use to optimize your website and all you need are a few simple web design skills. Whether redesigning a site or creating one from scratch, these rules should apply.

Never use frames when creating a website. If your site uses frames, you may want to think about changing to tables. If you are going to change your site, make certain your HTML is clean and free of unnecessary code.

Each page should include two to three paragraphs of keyword rich body text. For example, if you sell tanning products at your "The Tanning Place" website and the name of your closest competitor is "Up Town Tan," you will want to write a paragraph that goes something like this: Are you looking for an up town tan? Then come to the Tanning Place for that gorgeous up town tan. We feature only the best tanning products from the best sources to give you a beautiful up town tan. Not only are you promoting your own website, if someone enters the term "up town tan" into the search box, then your site will appear along with "Up Town Tan," and you can possibly convince someone who was looking for "Up Town Tan" to come to your site, instead.

The paragraph may seem a little repetitious and simplistic, but your goal is to attract web crawlers and not literary agents. Your high school English teacher will not praise your efforts, unless she has switch to SEO as her career.

Do not duplicate content on each page or even from site to site, if you own more than one site. Make certain each one is differentiated as far as content. It is better to have fewer pages with no duplicated text.

Use internal text links instead of images with links. Web crawlers will not find the link if it is buried behind an image. When you use images, make sure you include alt tags on all of them. This gives you an opportunity to tell the search engines what your site is all about, once again.

Splash pages may look impressive for visitors, but they do little to increase your rankings. Keep your graphics to a minimum because text is what improves your page ranking.

Do not try to attract or fool web crawlers by hiding text, such as making it the same color as the background. It may take a little time, but you will be caught and penalized for this and other black hat practices. I mention again, you are not being graded on your literary ability so do not be afraid to write a couple of keyword rich paragraphs.

There are so many people out there that claim to know about Search Engine Optimization and who claim to know what it means to have an SEO-friendly website, it makes one wonder if all of these people really know what the process is all about. Chances are you, the website owner, hired someone with the idea that you were getting great SEO result and found that your results were only mediocre at best.

Oddly enough, it is not just smaller companies that are confused by the entire SEO issue, but larger firms suffer from SEO confusion. Also, higher priced doesn't always mean better service. Shop around and ask the hard questions before hiring an SEO firm.

The thing to remember is that SEO has changed since the beginning. Search engine algorithms have evolved and are far more sophisticated. This evolution means that the guidelines are continually changing.

SEO is a little more than ten years old. In the beginning, webmasters began optimizing sites by submitting a page or two to search engines that would then send out a searchbot or spider to crawl that page, extract links to the other pages in the site and gather the information found on the pages it finds.

The process involved a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server when a second application, known as an indexer, extracts the information found on the pages. The information about the pages, such as the words found on the pages, links, where everything is located on the page, is then placed into a scheduler to be crawled again at a later date.

Early versions of search engine algorithms relied solely on the webmaster providing information through the metatags, or index files. Metatags provided a kind of road map to the page's content. As soon as webmasters realized this was the procedure, it became an unreliable system because webmasters could manipulate keywords and descriptions so that they had nothing at all to do with the actual page content.

All of this changed when Google arrived on the scene in 1998. Not only was Google's simple page design appealing to Internet users, users liked the off-page factors such as page ranking and the on-page analysis of a website. This eliminated the keyword manipulation that plagued other search engines.

SEO today is improving the volume of website traffic and the quality of visitors to the site via the use of targeted keywords. An SEO expert has to think like their consumer, and they also have to understand how the algorithms work. SEO should involve the site's code, overall design, text-rich content, accurate navigation and eliminate anything that would prevent a spider from crawling the entire site.

In addition to organic searches to the site, a good SEO firm will establish a pay-per-click advertising campaign to boost site visibility. Google considers popularity a major factor when ranking a page.

A well-conceived plan will attack the web from several different angles at the same time. Social networking is an important factor as well as inbound links. The inbound links have to be chosen carefully and have a relationship to the website in some way. Otherwise, Google may consider the site simply a link farm.

Search Engine Optimization

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