Business Solutions

I think I’m safe in saying that anyone who operates a website wonders how to get it into the top 10 search results, and that one thought has created an industry with the tools and knowledge to answer this very question, and the process has come to be known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Many say that SEO methodology has become more of an art employed to bring improvement to the ranking of a website in Search Engine results given certain targeted “keywords,” and I tend to agree with that consensus. You need to understand that “keywords” are the words or phrases that your target market uses most to limit search results to more specific sites including product or services that you might offer. To illustrate, you might want your website to rank high for “Disc Golf accessories,” but you couldn’t care less if it rates high for “Garden Supplies,” because that is NOT your target market niche.

Most people of course don’t realize that Search Engines are actually very limited software programs, which don’t have the intelligence built into them to understand everything they encounter on the Web. What they use is constantly evolving rules to score and rate a website’s capability to answer a very specific question, and now that we understand this knowledge, we can break down the Search Engine Optimization process into the following three categories:

HTML code: This is the part of Search Engine Optimization for programmers, since an in-depth knowledge and understanding of web coding standards and techniques is required, and typical software packages have historically produced poor results which take a lot of the human touch and intervention to ensure optimum results.

Tailoring the Content: When given a set of keywords, a Search Engine rates pages according to their respective relevancy, so that you have to build your content with those specific keywords always in mind. What is fundamental to determining just which keywords are relevant is a complete understanding of your target market niche, including knowledge of the typical questions they ask when searching for answers. Is important for you to know and understand there are websites (i.e. www.wordtracker.com, www.google.com/insights/search, etc.) dedicated to helping you determine the most commonly used keywords, and you should make extensive use of them.

Keep in the back of your mind throughout the process, that this is not a race of numbers to see how many keywords you can fill the page with, because there is an optimum keyword density. Too dense with too many keywords and it will be considered spamming, and you will most certainly be penalized. Too little, and you are neither ranked nor considered an authoritative source of information. It would be wise of you to dial in on a specific set of keywords, and remember you are trying to optimize for only those asking a specific question.