Week Ten | Part One

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, can cause confusion among even the most experienced Web masters. It is as much art and intuition as it is a science. The basic purpose of search engine optimization is to make your Web site as friendly to search engines as possible.

This lecture focuses on organic or unpaid SEO. This means that you are optimizing your page content so that it ranks high on a search engine results page without paying for that position. This is different than using SEO for a CPC (cost-per-click) advertising campaign such as Google Adwords, but the concepts and methods are almost the same.

Before we jump into the optimization part, let's look at the main components of SEO.

Type of Search Engines

First, there are three types of search engines that you and I use:

• Crawler-based search engines (Google)
• Referer-based directories (Yahoo)
• Hybrid engines that use a combination of crawlers and referers

Creepy Crawlers

Crawler search engines are the most popular type, and these are the engines that will make the most of any SEO you do for your Web pages.

Crawler search engine works in this sequence:

1. The search engine firm sends a crawler (computer application) to your Web server. The crawler follows links from your index page to other pages within your site. It is programmed to return to your Web site on a regular basis (usually once per month) to look for changes.

2. All the content the crawler finds goes back to the search engine company where the information is indexed. Consider the index as a catalog of your Web site. If information changes on your site, the index is updated to reflect those changes after it is crawled.

3. Some very sophisticated software then searches through all the indexes of all the Web sites and matches what someone is looking for on the Web with the information the search engine has indexed. The page that gets sent to the person doing the query (or search) is called the search engine results page (SERP).

Content Relevance

Success with SEO is based on relevance. This means that there is a strong connection between the content on your Web site and the search term a potential visitor entered when conducting his or her Web search.

Relevance can be tied to what written information you provide to your readers. This, however, is only a portion of all the relevant information that can be built into your Web pages. Relevance can also be built up with:

• Page titles
• Heading tags
• Alt property on images
• Classes and IDs in embedded or linked cascading style sheets
• URIs and Web site structure
• File and directory names

It is entirely possible to build up relevance using these markup items and not add any unnecessary text in the part of your page that your visitors read. In fact, as far as the search engine is concerned, it is probably best not to load your text with redundant language.

Another no-no is to put relevant text inside of comment tags (where they are hidden from the reader, but not the crawler) or to hide relevant text by having the font color match the background color. This is a very old (and ineffective) technique that search engines picked up on years ago --- so don't do it!

Please go to Week Ten Part 2 ».