My take on SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Submitted by Mike Youmans, Owner of ATSites.net on 04/08/2008 at 12:25:54 pm.

This week I spent some time researching the current state of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and figured I would share what I learned. I read a ton of information so what I will try to do is summarize the key points and let you dig deeper if you feel like it would benefit you to do so.

First, let's look at the definition of SEO.

Wikipedia defines SEO as the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords.

In other words, make your website come up closer to the top of the search results on the search engines by properly placing the right keywords in the right places(s). Well, how would we do that?

In the past, all you had to do was type as many relevant keywords into your website's keyword meta tag and wait for the ranking to go up. Clever internet marketers just 'spammed' their keywords with so much data that nearly any search would bring them up. Now that search engine 'spiders' (services that search the websites and collect the data to populate their algorithms) are more intelligent, it takes a bit more planning and thought to make your site climb the listings.

Here are the steps, in order, you need to take to optimize your results in the search engines:


The TITLE tag
At the top of every webpage is the Titlebar. It tells a visitor where they are. In Internet Explorer 7 with default settings, it is the blue bar across the top of the window. The tag in the webpage that defines that is weighed heavily by search engines. Each page should have relevant information in the TITLE tag to the content on that page. It would even serve you better from an SEO standpoint to put your site name AFTER the title. Well thought out and descriptive titles can go a long way to getting you ranked higher in the search results.

Links to your website from other sites
This is another heavily weighed factor in your search engine ranking. The engines assume that if numerous sites link to your pages, then your content must be authoritative on that particular subject. This concept spawned a technique called link-farming. Link-farming is the process of getting links to your site on other sites by means other than simply an authors desire to link to you. This was specifically for search engine optimization and usually was an automated process where sites create links to other sites who then link back to that site and so on. Search engines are now smart enough to disregard or even ban such sites from the search listings.

For you to get links from other sites, the method is clear but infinitely more difficult; Have content worth linking to! Collaborate with authorities on the subject that your site features or have well-written, all-in-one-place documents that people will refer to as good resources or reference material.

Having your keywords show up in your page text
Since nobody actually knows exactly how rankings are calculated, much of SEO is thinking how a 'spider' would think. Logically, if your title is about turtles and the word "turtle" appears numerous times throughout the page, the title is then relevant to the content and should be considered relevant to turtles. If instead the word "turtle" appeared nowhere in the document, how can that page be an authority on the subject? Make sense?

Clearly, don't overdo it. Spamming the keywords throughout the page could get the page ignored or banned from the search engine results.

Concentrate on a specific market segment
In one document I read on the subject of SEO, I learned about an intriguing theory about market segments. According to Chris Anderson (the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine), businesses can find a lot of value focusing on what he refers to as the "long tail". Here is an excerpt of his writing on the concept:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

What this meant to me is that if you are hoping to get high in the rankings of very general search terms like "Computers" or "Websites", the competition is too great for you to logically make any progress unless you clearly make the best ones that the world has ever seen. In that case, you would be linked to by everyone and would climb automatically. Realistically, you should focus your marketing to a smaller subset of the populous, the "long tail" and market to either a specific region, business type or other qualifier. "Websites for small businesses in Northern Illinois" may be an appropriate niche to target or "Computers built from old railroad equipment". The other clear advantage of this type of focus is that when you do get visitors from search engines, they will be more likely to turn into buyers giving you that all important "conversion". Isn't that what marketing is really all about?

If you would like to read one of the documents referring to the "Long Tail" and providing some great information on SEO, you can find it here.