Search Engine Optimization: Basic Concepts

Nearly all people on the Web visit search engines to find information or Web sites. They enter keywords into the search line of these search engines. Often they enter several keywords, or "phrases," to further refine their searches. Search engines are in the business of sorting Web sites in their databases by the words they contain that match a given search. How many searches are performed everyday? The following statistics were taken from Search Engine Watch's website:

How well you incorporate important keywords into your Web site consistent with each individual search engine's ranking criteria will determine your Web site's rank. Since there could be thousands of pages with that same keyword or phrase on it, it's important that you rank near the top of the results to be found.

Generally, each search engine assigns "points" to Web sites or the submission someone made describing that Web site based on some predefined criteria. While these ranking criteria may vary from search engine to search engine, most "grade" the page based on the following general rules:

• Keyword Placement
• Keyword Frequency
• Total Words
• Keyword Weight
• Keyword Prominence
• Site popularity
• Keyword Placement

The area in which the keyword is found plays a key role for many searches. Having the keyword in the Title tag on most search engines will give more relevance to the page than the same keyword appearing in the body area. To rank well generally requires you have keywords in many of the areas in which a search engine looks.

The areas that are the most important will vary by search engine. Examples of "areas" of a page are Title, Heading, Link Text, and Body.

Keyword Frequency
Frequency is how often a keyword appears on the page or in an area on the page. In general, the more times a keyword appears on the page, the more relevant it will be to that search.

You don't want to go overboard with frequency since many engines will penalize you for keyword "spamming" if they feel you were excessive. In general though, use your keyword in the document in as many different areas as you can, and as many times as is recommended for that engine.

Total Words
This is simply a count of the total words in a given area, not including HTML tags. Some engines may rank pages more favorably based on whether they have a certain number of words on the page. Sometimes the fewer words the better, and on other engines, more words are sometimes better.

Keyword Weight
Keyword weight is the percentage or concentration of keywords on your page in relation to all other words on the page. A "keyword" can be either a single word, or a short phrase.
(number of words in the keyword phrase * frequency) / total words in area

Therefore, you're weight will logically increase when the number of keywords on the page increases or the number of words on the page decreases.

Some search engines consider keyword weight when determining the rank of your page for a particular keyword search. In general, the higher the weight the better, but only to a point. If your weight becomes too high, you may be penalized.

Keyword Prominence
Prominence is how close to the start of the area that the keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the top of the page or area will be more relevant. However, sometimes it helps to have a keyword in the middle of an area, or even toward the end of the area.

For example, an AltaVista search for keyword "fine art paper" returned the following match:
Fine Art Paper and Bookmaking Supplies
Looking for fine art papers for drawing, printmaking, painting, and bookmaking? Call Artpaper ... Papers from Nepal Papers from Thailand Paper in Rolls Paper Samplers Bookshelf ORDERING ...
www.artpaper.com • Refreshed in past 48 hours • Related Pages

Note that the queried keyword phrase, "fine art paper," is the first word of the site title and AltaVista returned this site as the first match. Documents that are exactly the same, but with keywords as the second or third word in the Title will often score lower. Prominence also applies to the words within the body of the document, the headings, and other tags.

Prominence plays a critical role particularly in directory-based engines such as Yahoo. Often having the keyword slightly more towards the beginning of the site description or site title will make a large difference in your ranking.

Site Popularity
This ranking measurement is sometimes called a site's significance ranking because it is believed that one measure of a site's "value" is the number of other Web sites who felt your site was sufficiently important to link to.

If lots of other sites link to your site, chances are your site is relatively important -- or so a good number of other Web site owners thought so. The popularity of the site that links to you can also play a role.

For instance, at least 98,400 Web sites link to the IBM (www.ibm.com) Web site in Google's index (on Nov 5, 2003). In certain search engines, IBM would achieve better ranking with all other factors being equal. However, this is only one factor, and you can certainly achieve high rankings without being linked from thousands of sites. This is simply another reason why you want to get other sites to link to yours. Sometimes if you agree to link to them, they'll do the same for you. In Web marketing, this is called "cross-linking," sometimes called "reciprocal linking" and is another way to increase traffic to your web site.

Final Words

When you monitor and quantify your web traffic statistics and then apply search engine optimization techniques you have a set of extremely powerful weapons against your competitors. Yet it's often tedious work monitoring your progress.

There are trained professionals in Search Engine Optimization who stay on top of all major search engine ranking criteria and have proven methods for achieving high ranking. You coulc consider using a professional service, but be sure to have them provide factual information about the web sites they've optimized. Choose a client of theirs and targeted keywords and search on them yourself using Google. The proof's in the pudding.

DO NOT use websites that submit your website to hundreds of search engines and directories. These submissions are often ignored and sometimes blacklist the URL's for a length of time.

While there are search engine optimization and submission software packages available on the market, the only one that I have proven experience with is Web Position Gold. I have used this software on many of my own URLs and now that I am confident with its performance, have used it for some of my clients websites with incredible results.

This program can relieve you of much of the preliminary testing and record gathering, competitor comparisons, etc and get you directly involved in making the needed code changes for optimization. Finally, the software submits your website pages according to variables you set which are inline with search engine rules and guidelines.

If you can't afford software or an SEO professional, then the old fashioned way will prove efficient if rather slow. I did it this way for years with no problem...just tons of time. Use the resources below to get more detailed information about SEO before you venture into changing the code on your website. You wouldn't want to lower your ranking!

Helpful Websites
Search Engine Optimization Strategies
Search Engine Optimization Tips by bCentral
Search Engine Optimization World Forums
Search Engine Submission Tips by Search EWngine Watch
NetWatch - providing a variety of tools and tips to help you market your website

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