Let’s start with how search engines work. You are looking for a boat, so you type that into Google. Behind the scenes, the targeted words or keywords have been categorized by the search engine spiders and put into their database to pop when requested. The database is made up of infinite entries of the web pages that were gathered by spiders or bots and/or human editors. So do the spiders read every page of the web? No. They look through Cliff Notes of each page. Who writes these Cliff Notes? You do, as the designer of the web site. The Cliff Notes take into account the following:
– the name of the web site and particular web page;
– words used in the title of the web page;
– the first paragraph or two of the web page;
– meta tags;
– internet web links and other links coming to the web page.
Optimize means to make as perfect, effective, or functional as possible. Therefore, to optimize your website for search engines means to make your website as perfect and functional as possible to gain higher placement/ranking in search engine results.
Here are a few other terms to know.
– Natural or organic search – the results from a search engines rules without any payment of any kind.
– Paid Search- the results from a submission fee or bid has been paid to appear in
– Search engine marketing (SEM)- combines search activities natural and paid
Various engines have various rules to how they rank sites. Here are three items all take into account.
Links
– coming in to the site are more important than those going out. -Links from link farms diminish your ranking
– the links need to be relevant to your site.
Content
– original high quality content
– newer content tend to have higher rankings
Keywords/ Keyword phrases
– Place them in key places on your site.
– Do not use keywords or phrases that are not relevant to your site.
If you have not made it to the first page of Google keep trying and throw in some optimizing.
Always Progressing.