SEO

Search Engine Optimization is all about making sure your site is highly visible to search engines. It focuses exclusively on un-paid “organic” search results, as opposed to pay-per-click search results.

There is a ton you can do to get your site well ranked without paying a cent. A lot of it has to do with understanding how search engines work and building your site for SEO from the ground up.

Don’t Try Any Funny Stuff

A lot of otherwise honest people seem to think that the way to get a site to come up at the top of a search results page is to try and somehow trick the search engines.

This does not work and is not a good idea. Google for example uses a semi-secret set of instructions called an algorithm to decide how pages get listed in search results, and they are known to change this algorithm many times per week.

Why do they change it so much?

Google is highly concerned with staying one step ahead of whatever the tactic of the moment is for artificially improving a web page’s ranking. The primary goal of a search engine is to serve up the most relevant and reliable info to the person searching.

This sounds like a simple point, but it’s a very important one. Google is the lead search engine because they have consistently been the best at providing quality search results. Google has to remain ever vigilant to weed out the less high-quality sites that are trying to get to the top of the rankings. For this reason, if you do questionable things, you may very well be docked or blocked.

How Linking Works

The whole organizational structure of the internet is based on … wait for it … LINKS!

HTML is the language of the internet. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup language. “Hypertext Markup” refers specifically to links. So HTML really is “Link Language.”

In HTML, the code for a link is “a href”. The “a” lets you know that this is the primary component of HTML, as in Alpha or number one. The “h” in “a href” stands for HTML, because the original programmers say so. The “ref” in href stands for reference, as in what is this a link to?

Search engines use programs called spiders (or bots) to “crawl the web.” So when a spider sees “a href” it knows it’s looking at a link and it notes what the link is pointing to. So if you get a lot of links pointing to a page on your site, that page will rank higher in the search results.

As an aside, the words in the link matter. A link that contains some of your site’s keywords such as “We are Los Angeles based marketing and branding experts”, is much stronger than a link that says “click here”.

Keyword and Header Basics

Keywords are often times actually phrases, such as “WordPress specialists.” People type them into a search box and matches come up. So it makes sense to figure out the right words and phrases that will get the right people onto your site, and to use them. This sounds simple but it is an ongoing process, and usually takes a fair amount of thought and research.

Headers in HTML are Written as “H1″ through “H6″ with 1 being the most important and by far the most often used for SEO. The spider understands that anything in the header tag is likely to specifically tell it what the page is about. A lot of modern web software, such as WordPress, automatically formats all page and post titles as “H1″ tags. Once you know this, you can see how beneficial it can be to use your top keywords and phrases in your page and post titles.

Striking a Balance and Getting Ranked

This is just a tip of the SEO iceberg, but the main point is that you must strike a balance. Search engines want you to provide information for humans, not to pander to the spiders. The reality is that you have to build your site for both. Once you do this, the spiders, engines and humans will reward you with more traffic and more business.