Search Engine Optimization
Best Practices for Increasing Your Site’s Visibility

Ah, the mysteries of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you’re like most conscientious web site owners, you know you need it, you’ve heard a lot of hype about it – but you don’t really understand it. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of SEO service providers are counting on. If you’re not careful, you can end up paying a lot of money for a lot of empty promises. This month, we’ll take a look at the basic components of SEO – and expose some of the hype for what it really is.

First, let’s start by differentiating between two types of search engine results. When you search on a word or phrase, you get two types of results. The first type includes the one or two highlighted results that you will sometimes see at the top of the page, plus the highlighted results in the right-hand column. These highlighted, “sponsored” results are paid advertisements – pay-per-click advertising. We’ll tackle that topic in the coming months. The second type of results, down the center of the page and usually continuing on for several million more pages…that’s what we’re dealing with today. We’ll call those the “natural” search results.

Natural search results are the work result of “bots” or “spiders” that endlessly crawl the web, visiting every page and following every link they can find. All of the information they find is captured and indexed in a massive database. Then, when you submit a search, this database is queried for pages that appear to match. How the pages are evaluated, weighted and ranked differs slightly from one search engine to another, but the basic mechanics are the same.

So what are the bots looking for? That’s the key to SEO. First and foremost, the search engines like to see relevant content. That includes the amount of information, the number of times relevant key words and terms appear in your content, the relevant sites that link to/from your site and sometimes even what words are emphasized in bold or italics will affect the results. A well-constructed web page also contains a wealth of information behind the scenes, in page titles, image tags and “meta tags.” Page titles are the descriptions that appear in your browsers title bar, at the upper left of your browser window. Image tags are the captions you often see if you hover your cursor over an image. And meta tags include keywords and page descriptions that are invisible to the end user, but tell the bots specifically what subjects you think your web page should be associated with. (In a perfect world, that would make things really easy, right? But meta tags have already been long-abused by scammers and spammers, so their weight in search engine results has been greatly diminished…)

So those are the fundamentals, but even if you have all of the above-mentioned elements in place, there are still some reasons that your site may not be getting the presence it deserves in natural search results. Some of the big ones include:

• Text contained in graphics – graphic text can’t be read by bots; bots see “an image” and read only the image tag to ascertain what the image is. A potential workaround is to link to a long description in another file, but it is always best to use real text when possible.
• Graphic menu buttons/Menus built in Javascript or Flash – most bots can’t follow these links, so they may find your home page but miss the rest of your site! Workarounds are to include redundant text links elsewhere on your page, or a link to a text-based site map. And another major stumbling block may be:
• Lack of semantic, accessible markup – if you’re using tables or frames, the bots may not be able to make sense of what they’re finding. Standards-based markup gives meaning and hierarchy to your page layout, allowing bots to find your content among all your other code and, in some ways, understand its importance on the page.

Those are the basic issues that need to be addressed when optimizing your site. If you've done all of that correctly and you're still not getting the results you had hoped for, it's most likely a simple matter of competition in your space - in that regard, the internet is no different than other media. Rather than spending additional time and money on SEO, you may see a better return from targeted marketing, which can generate higher quality traffic, rather than sheer volume.

Before we wrap up, let’s talk about those promises of “#1 placement” or “guaranteed results.” There is no way to guarantee your placement in natural search results unless you (a) control the search engine yourself or (b) create a new word or phrase that no one else is using (and for which no one would probably search anyway). Some services promise to submit your web site to thousands of search engines every month. In reality there are only 3 major players, Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three feed most of the other search engines you’ve ever heard of. (Google accounts for about 80% of search engines, itself.) Furthermore, your URL only needs to be submitted once, to let them know you’re out there – and if your site is well-connected to other resources on the web, the bots will soon find you anyway, whether you’ve been officially submitted or not. You may also hear of strategies to “trick” the search engines – link farms, keyword stuffing, mirror pages, hidden text… Search engines are wise to these techniques, and once these methods are detected, your site may be excluded from their search results altogether. At best, these techniques are likely to draw a high volume of low-quality traffic and subject your servers to an unhealthy influx of spam. Despite the promises, these are not optimal techniques for your site. Best to stay on the straight and narrow.

Last but not least, I would encourage you to check out Google's SEO resources for consumers and web masters. Google knows a thing or two about SEO, and you will see that their dogma is largely reflected in Silverline's philosophy.

For more information about how to increase your site’s visibility on the web, contact Silverline Creative for an SEO evaluation and proposal. We’ll do everything we can to improve your natural search results, and we’ll do it right. From there, you may decide to enter the world of pay-per-click advertising – but we’ll save that topic for next time.

Steve Lovisa
President
Silverline Creative