The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. No you don’t get to optimize the search engine, unless you own one. You optimize your site for the search engine. There are many search engines and they do not look at everything related to a site in the same way. Search engines collect and sort data based on the software design of it’s owners. If all search engines used the same rules, searches and data, the search results from all of them would roughly be the same. What a boring world that would be… Anyway the data on your site pages is what must be optimized for the search engines.
Okay, you say, but what do I do to optimize my site?
Before we can get into what you do, you need to understand what a search engine does when it visits your site. The first thing a search engine is supposed to do when it visits your site is check your robots.txt file to see what is allowed to be searched at your site. Once that is known, then the engine should be finding a site’s opening page. The page title, page name, page description and other relevant search information, determined by the search engine site, (more pages or links) would be collected by the search engine robot and returned back to the search engine site. At some point the displayed text information on your site pages is compared to the previously collected information. Your site or pages get ranked in search engine results based on the specific sorting procedures for any particular search engine. All search engines basically need the same information from your site pages in order to determine validity and value of the information.
Okay now that we have covered what a search engine basically needs to see, let’s move on to the site itself. All Internet sites display pages of information for site visitors. Pages are displayed based on what the user was searching for through the search engine and what the search engine will display to the user, with the latter usually controlled by the search engines designers, by sorting out available information.
A page description should support a page title and key words or phrases should identify the displayed page content. The more relevant the title, description and displayed content, the more relevant the page is based on the key phrases and what the user was searching for.
So what is the best way to design the page for relevance?
Duh! Write your content (displayed text or information) first. Break your information up as you would say for a book report and reorganize it so it makes sense from beginning to end. Use objective opening paragraphs and do get subjective or as specific as possible, with your content in additional paragraphs. Stay on topic and if you do wander in your writing, don’t worry about it, it can always be edited into another topic. Wandering is to your benefit when writing, since you do have a lot to say. But editing for flow and consistency is important for your message and the search engines using it correctly.
After you have written what you need to say, clear your head and reread what you have written as objectively as possible, from a stranger’s point of view. Do not even think about editing anything, just read it all and see if it makes sense to you as a stranger.
Did what you write make sense to you as stranger? Were you lead through every topic and sub-topic by building up what you wrote in a beginning to end fashion. Once you are satisfied with what you have to say, you can begin thinking about search engine optimization.
Once your text material is written correctly and grammatically displayed correctly, you can now create a page description and identify the key words and phrases in the content of your pages. A page description can contain a portion of the page title, some key words and must describe the displayed content or page theme as closely as possible.
Did you ever notice that sometimes no matter what is present on a page, sometimes it shows up randomly right away in search engines?
That happens for a number of reasons, but probably the most likely reason is the search engine just found it and listed it in a few days. If you have been publishing good content regularly and your site has been around for a while, the odds are whatever you published would be available through the search engines, once they are finished searching your sites and updating their databases. If you or your sites are a trusted source or a paying source, your information has a good chance of getting placed right away.
Okay you have done everything, published everything and even submitted to a few search engines to speed things up, now what?
Well are you writing about a popular topic? Is your site content part of popular searches for any specific search engine? As strange as this sounds, search engines are controlled by people and search engines do what they are supposed to do according to sort rules and other rules written by people. So keep in mind no matter how good your content or site may seem, the display of it is ultimately controlled by people and what they allow the search engine to do with your information.
What about pictures on your pages?
Every picture, including the linked ones, should have an alternate description. If a picture does not display, the alternate text is seen, so the visitor should see some descriptive alternate text identifying the picture or link.
What about additional links on your pages?
This one area can make or break your page too. Every external link (not internal site page links) should be referring to relevant content or advertisements and provide the same quality or better written quality as your site material. Be sure to not violate any of terms of use of external material or include any unacceptable advertising, when combining multiple supplier ads on your pages.