Search Engine Optimization: A Basic Introduction (Part 2 of 2)

Yesterday I posted a little introduction to search engine optimization. As I stated, document analysis and link analysis are cornerstones of the SEO process, but there’s much more. Without a professional-looking site and fantastic content, none of that matters. So to continue…

Quality Site
Most importantly, for your site to be crawled and properly indexed, you need a site worthy of traffic. This means having a site with good usability, professional design and high-quality content. A site with good usability is easily crawled because it has clear navigation and organizational hierarchy, making subject matter easily assessed. Professional design conveys authority and trust, making viewers more likely to visit and backlink to your site. Finally, high-quality content will bring links and invite viewers to spend more time on your site.

How do you apply this knowledge to your own site? To start, here are some steps you should take in order to get the process rolling:

What You Can Do

1. Do some research and define your audience: What are potential users of your site most likely to search for?
2. Make your keywords prominent by putting them in important locations such as the title of your page.
3. Choose specific keywords relevant to your niche. Generic keywords invite competition SERPs. Choose one or two unique phrases to target per page on a new site.
4. Make your web address brief and descriptive. You can include keywords here, as well.
5. Write quality copy for your site. Search engines use lexical analysis to judge quality and rank pages, so hire a copy editor if you need to.
6. Include a site map that offers links to your site’s internal pages. Many sites, such as xml-sitemaps.com, offer this service for free.and provide step-by-step directions.
7. Make sure your designer can generate clean code. Invalid HTML and CSS, broken links and large file sizes negatively affect a site’s ability to be crawled.
8. Avoid designing with nested tables, which break up text and make it difficult for a page to be crawled. Sites created in the past year and later should include smart usage of CSS. Older sites relying on tables should consider upgrading their page layouts.

The Bottom Line
Even professional search engine optimizers are unaware of the exact procedure search engines use to rank pages. If all the secrets were released, the process could be cheated, rendering search engines less effective at returning relevant information. The bottom line is that high rankings come from high-quality pages with professional design and great content. Follow that mantra and you have taken the biggest step toward obtaining a high ranking.

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