Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

"Our site has now doubled in traffic since you recreated it for us and started on the search engine optimization (seo)!"  - Chris Dunn, President, Lincoln Land, Inc.

Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the art and technology of making a web page attractive to the search engines, causing it to rank higher up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) when users enter search queries on internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, etc.

For example: You go to a search engine such as Google, type in the words "healthy cat food" and a list of pages come up with links to various websites. How high up the SERPs these links appear depends a great deal on how relevant the search engines consider their content to be when compared to your search query.

The search engines' goals are to provide users with relevant information.  For instance, Google’s stated MISSION is "to make the world’s information universally acceptable and useful."  In their view, relevance helps to give a positive user experience and keep users returning. Therefore, Google places emphasis on the relevance of both the search results and the sponsored ads that appear when users type in search queries at Google.  ("Sponsored listings" are the ones you see on the right-hand side of the page - or sometimes at the very top or bottom of the page - when you type in a search query at Google.com and other search engines.)

Newer sites sometimes have trouble showing up high on the SERPs.  Rumor has it (no one knows for sure) that Google keeps new sites in a "sand box."  This refers to the fact that some new sites, even though apparently optimized for the search engines, do not show up in the search results for some time, or at least not very high up in the results.  In other words, they are kept in the "sand box" until they've been around for awhile.

However, just to be contrary, we've had clients tell us that they received phone calls from viewers who had found their site while we were still in the process of building it on another domain. So much for the sand box! (As we create sites, we often put up some of the pages where only the respective clients knows where they are so they can see how things are progressing, give their input and so on.)

In other words, the site wasn't even finished, yet it was already showing up for a specific search query, resulting directly in online orders for the client. True!  Our theory is that, sand box or no sand box, if your site is rich in the type of content people are looking for in search search queries, and it's properly optimized, you are going to show up - especially, if you are not trying to compete head on for the same exact keywords that a million other sites that have been around for awhile are using.  Finding and testing the right keywords for YOUR site is part of good SEO work.

SEO is an ongoing activity requiring time and attention to detail because search engines change their requirements frequently.  Google's algorithm is said to change daily in order to keep up with the ever-changing needs of the market, and web masters' attempts at trying to outsmart the search engines.

Here is a quote from the Google website that provides a little insight into some aspects of how they rank web pages and how their software looks for pages that are relevant to a user's search query.  (Keep in mind that Google updates its algorithm daily and makes substantial changes periodically, and we do not include references to all of these changes here. However, we continually keep abreast of these changes so we can deliver top-quality search engine marketing to our clients.)

"PageRank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.

"PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. Google's technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement.

"Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Google's search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google's technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query."

In the end, you can't fool the search engines for long.  But you can use "legitimate" optimization techniques to help propel your site up the SERPs.

The first step in making your site appealing to both viewers and the search engines is to have content on your website's pages that the people you want to attract will find interesting, informative, useful and relevant to their needs.  Then you need to apply many other legitimate techniques to increase your appeal to the search engines. 

We use a checklist containing more than 50 items when optimizing websites. Not every site requires all of these checklisted items, but they do require MANY if not most of them.

Need help in getting your site showing higher on the search engine results pages?  Contact us.  We may be able to help you.   727.442.9137