Search Engines are the eyes and ears of the world wide web – without them, finding relevant content online would be a nightmare. By categorizing and indexing websites, they organize sites by the relevance of whatever we’re looking for. In a perfect world, any website created would instantly be analyzed and categorized so it’s target audience could find it effortlessly. Current search engines, however, are imperfect; they require a helping hand in their quest for relevant content. That’s why search engine optimization exists.
At the most basic level, search engine optimization is a series of techniques and practices designed to increase your website’s visibility on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN, usually for marketing purposes. Nine out of ten people looking for a product or service through a search engine will only pay attention to the first page of results, and beyond the second page your website will only receive a visit from one percent of those searching, so achieving a high ranking is important.
Search Engine Optimization techniques generally fall into two categories - White Hat and Black Hat. I’ll be discussing White Hat SEO, since Black Hat SEO is ineffective, dishonest, and is generally terrible Karma.
Websites can (and should) be designed from the ground up to make their content easily accessible to search engines. Basic search engine optimization is fairly straightforward, such as making sure all relevant content on the site in question is formatted as text (including headers and navigation) and using appropriate meta data. More effective SEO techniques are more difficult and often take some time to be effective, such as ensuring your content has the appropriate keyword density, and encouraging related website to provide links to you and vice versa. Often these techniques require research and time in order to be effective, so seeking the services of a professional web designer or SEO specialist is usually much more effective than doing so independently.
We’ve recently developed a plugin for the Expression Engine CMS designed to automate some of the ongoing SEO process. Using a proprietary program, we can extract relevant keywords from the CMS content and use them as meta keywords. This program also has potential as a research tool – any amount text-based content can be categorized screened for relevant terms and phrases. Doing so can help us to build a relationship between different sets of terms and content or find out what people are saying about us, our clients, or our competitors.
Before I finish, there are a few basic and easy steps webmasters can take to improve their site’s rankings:
Sean joined 720 Strategies in 2007 as a Junior Web Developer, and has several years experience developing desktop applications and rich web applications using HTML, Javascript, and PHP.
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