Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization aims to help a business obtain its goals by increasing relevant rankings within the free listings of search engines. This can involve keyword research, search engine friendly design, new content and link building. What tactics are used and the amount of work involved depends on what a unique business is looking for as an end result.
Some companies only want to ensure that existing customers looking for the website can find it easily. This is usually the case for either new sites, or sites that have issues preventing search engines from properly listing them. Search engines work well with text and traditional links but technologies such as Flash and JavaScript can prevent the engines from properly listing the site. While some workarounds exist, the site’s structure may need some modifications. For new sites, the problem is often that search engines don’t know the site exists. Often, adding a few links from other sites solves the issue.
Other businesses look to SEO to drive new traffic. This often involves finding which keywords are likely to drive business goals and either creating new pages or modifying existing ones to target those phrases. For competitive phrases, additional links are often needed from other quality sites on similar subject matter.
Basics
What do search engines look for in a website? Search engines are in the business of providing their customers with a good experience by delivering quality and relevance. Relevance is simply do the results have information relative to the search query. Quality relates to a number of factors such as occurrences of errors, download speed, and other factors indicative of a low quality site.
Keyword Research
Knowing what phrases to target is a huge piece of the puzzle, and choosing the best phrases is not as intuitive as one would think. For example, a camp looking to attract customers for weeklong summer sessions might choose to target the phrase "residential camp". While people do actually search for this phrase (Google estimates about 6,600 monthly searches), it is jargon often used by those in the industry. A camp administrator might search for this phrase, but mom, dad, Billy and Susie are more likely to search for phrases such as "summer camp" (1,220,000 searches), "overnight camp" (27,100 searches) and "youth camps" (60,500 searches).
Good keyword research starts with those involved in the business but should not end there. Resources exist such as Google’s keyword tool and Wordtracker that allow us to view estimates of search traffic for particular and related phrases. Additionally, a great deal can be learned by investigating what competitors are targeting.
Link Building
Go to Google and do a search for "click here" and click on the top result (Adobe Reader). Oddly enough, the page doesn’t contain the word "click" or the word "here". However, many other sites link to this page with the words "To download the latest version of Adobe Reader click here."
Links help search engines determine which sites are quality and relevant. If 10,000 other sites link to yours it is probably a better site then one with only a few links. If every major automotive site links to yours, it is logical for search engines to assume you have content relative to users looking for automotive information.
The best advice for link building? Build a site and create content worth linking to.
SEO Friendly Design
Search engines scan a site using programs called crawlers or spiders. These crawlers look at a page and scan the content for later analysis. After analysis, another crawler visits every link the first crawler found on the original page. Because Flash, JavaScript, and other methods can create links that are difficult for crawlers to identify, these technologies often throw up roadblocks to the crawlers.
Knowing how search engines interact with these technologies is essential to SEO. Additionally, a trained eye can look at a web page through the eyes of a search engine and identify where and how the engine likes to see words.