What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the content of a site to include search engine friendly keywords and improving the structure of a site to make as much sense to users and search engines as possible so that the amount of traffic driven to a site will increase.

The Importance of SEO

It’s pretty much explained in the definition above, but SEO’s important because it helps you drive more traffic to your site. Hopefully I don’t need to explain why more traffic is a good thing so I’ll just skip that. This is achieved through various methods including, enriching content with keywords that search engines are likely to pick up on.

What Search Engines Are Fond of

Before one starts down the long road of doing SEO for a particular site, one must first understand how search engines work and what they like to look for.

• Content that’s rich in keywords, but not stuffed.
• Content that’s easily accessible to search engines with little to no hindrance.
• An understandable and obvious information hierarchy for search engines to determine importance among elements, which in turn helps search engine spiders understand what a particular page is about.
• Quickly loading content for search engines to index easily.
• Reputable sources that link to your site help search engines help determine how good your site’s reputation is.
• A good content to code ratio. More content than code is what search engines like to see.
• Clean URLs that make sense. This means you must do extra work to make sure your dynamic web pages have proper names generated for them.
• Believe it or not, a domain’s lifespan can contribute to search engine rankings.

Ways to Promote SEO

There are a couple of ways to promote search engine optimization. One way is to adhere to accessibility standards. Content in alt and title attributes provides additional information about links and/or images that are in a site and gives more relevance to those particular elements. These two attributes are part of a broader spectrum that further encompasses ways that can promote search engine optimization. Of course, I speak of Web Standards.

Adhering to Web Standards helps with SEO more than you might think. Using semantic markup helps make sure that you don’t end up using code improperly or using more code than you need to. Plus, semantic markup presents your content in a way that’s easier for search engines to understand. It also helps prevent coding errors which can not only screw up your site dramatically, but can also really hurt your page rank. Following Web Standards also makes use of external code files (i.e. stylesheets) which allow for faster load times, which in turn leads to search engines indexing your pages more efficiently.

The Villain’s Approach to SEO

In other words, this is the section that includes the things that you should NOT do to improve your search engine rankings. Why do you want to avoid this approach? Because you can end up getting blacklisted by search engines, and that’s something you really don’t want to happen. So far, I’ve been outlining ways to help you promote search engine optimization, but now I’m going to go through a few ways that people have improved their page ranks through ways that are actually quite shady.

One famous method was bloating the keywords meta tag with all sorts of keywords that were completely irrelevant to the site. This was abused so much, in fact, that most reputable search engines have actually started to pay less and less attention to this tag to the point of some not even bothering to look at it at all.

A more subtle method that’s quite similar to this is bloating your actual content with keywords. This could be anything from just using a bunch of keywords that make no grammatical sense together in a sentence to just repeating the same thing over and over without having a real need to.

Another keyword abuse method involves invisible text. This means creating a paragraph that is overloaded with keywords, but you’ve used some way to make it invisible to users.

The last technique I’m going to talk about is a doorway page. This essentially means making a fake page that’s full of keywords that have no relevance to a site and use some form of page redirection, usually with JavaScript, to redirect users to your actual site. A rather famous company, BMW.de, got blacklisted for doing this.

Any Last Words?

While SEO is a very crucial part of web design and increases a site’s findability greatly, it’s not the only thing that contributes. Be sure to put as much effort into SEO as you do the other findability practices.