Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become quite a hot buzzword in the past few years. SEO amounts to looking at the HTML of your pages, and tweaking it to highlight your content to search engines and their spiders. Many times each individual tweak may be trivial, but taken together they can significantly increase your search engine rankings.

The goal of course of SEO is to get your site ranked as high as possible in the relevant search engines at that time. Google search engine rankings have been the holy grail for the past few years, and prior to that Yahoo search engine rankings held that position. And prior to that was Inktomi.... and so on. (Would you like to know the Google Page Rank of your site?) The point is that while today Google search engine rankings are of utmost importance, tomorrow it may be Yahoo search engine rankings that everyone is looking for. Or possibly MSN search rankings, or some other search engine.

In general though, a nice size portion of the SEO techniques touched on below are good practice for all search engines. True, you can manipulate a page to exploit any given search engine at the expense of others, but good SEO practices will make your users more satisfied with your site and more often than not lead them to return in the future.

• Page Title - Having just a domain name as your title, or a title with no keywords related to your site will not really give the spiders much to go on with regard to the content of your site
• Descriptive Meta Tags - It is true that many spiders do not use your meta tag data in your rankings explicitly. However, many do use the meta data to help classify your site.
• Dynamic Links - Sites offering dynamic data data is passed in link query strings continue to make trouble for spiders. Granted many spiders now traverse dynamic links, but in practice dynamic links do not seem to be tremendously prevalent in search engine results. There are several strategies for using static links to present dynamic data.
• Content - A critical review of the content of your site can often highlight keyword weakness problems. For example, if you want users to get to your site by searching for "college football", but you fail to use those terms consistently throughout your content, the traffic coming to your site searching for that term will be less than optimal. That does not mean that you should use the phrase "college football" incessantly on your site, but you do need to make sure it shows up more than once.
• External Links - Nearly all true search engines will have some component of their ranking based on page popularity. Page popularity (PR in Google terms), is typically based on links from other pages with relevant content and to some degree the actual link text used. (see our reciprocal link discussion for more information)