This little handbook explains how to make your Web site or a Web page in that site popular in search engines and how
to get more visitors for your site. These are the technical aspects of "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)."
Search Engine Optimization is
important for you if your organization or business depends on visitors to your Web site or Web log, or if you are
putting your opinions on the Web in order to popularize them. It is not important if your Web site is just meant to
impress investors or donors.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is based on a common sense solution to a simple problem. You create a Web site for,
let's say, guided tours of Spain, and put it on the Web. You have invested a great deal in graphics and layout for your
site, but you do not get any customer inquiries. In fact, you may be disappointed to find that almost nobody has visited
your site after a year.
The problem arises because there are many millions of Web sites, and new ones are born every day. Most people get to
a Web site or Web page by searching in a search engine or clicking on the link to that site in another site or a paid
advertisement. Search engines get their information by crawling the Web with their "spiders." The spider is a
machine, and the search engine is another machine. It has no way of knowing that your pages are all about Spanish
Tourism unless you make sure that it knows by including appropriate clues. It also needs to know that your page or
pages are considered good quality important information by other Web sites. Search Engine Optimization is all about
getting this information to search engine spiders.
There is usually no sense having a Web site if nobody sees it. Getting people to view your Web pages depends on the
popularity of those pages for key search words and other factors, most of which are known. Search Engine Optimization is
not an exact science, because search engine algorithms are proprietary and they change all the time to counter attempts
to "work the system." Each Search Engine works somewhat differently. The important ones are Google and Yahoo.
The object of game is get your page to be among the top 5 or 10 pages displayed by Google, Yahoo and other search
engines for at least one popular keyword combination related to your product or organization: Widgets, Flowers.
Barcelona Tourism, Middle East Conflict, History of Middle East Conflict are all examples of key word phrases. The main
page of a Web site should be optimized for the briefest and most popular key word that describes the whole theme of the
site. Other main pages should be optimized for other key words. Do not try to optimize for more than one keyword on one
page.
Optimization is the process of ensuring that the page is retrieved near the top of the list when people search for a
given key word. What are are the factors that make a page optimized?
* Content of the page - How the key word is used in the domain name or file name, in the text of the page and
in various code "tags" on that page.
* Importance of the Web site - That is determined by search engines based on the size of the Web site, how
many Web sites link to it and how important those Web sites are.
* Key Word links - The number of pages that link to a page or site using the key word. If your key word is
Widgets, but you asked people to link to your site using the company name, which is Acme, search engines won't "know"
that your page or site is about widgets. Think carefully about the name of the Web site and the names of the pages in
it, and the text to be used in the links.
Usually you will be
optimizing the main page of your Web site, but you will also try to optimize some key subsidiary pages for related
keywords. For example, the main page may be optimized for "Information Security" while subsidiary pages might be
optimized for "Wi-Fi Hacking" "Identity theft" etc. Each of these phrases is a "keyword." Obviously, words within the
phrase can also be keywords. However, "theft" or "Security" are very general words which might have 200 million pages
each stored in Google. It is unlikely that any reasonably sized Web site could get to the top of 200 million pages in a brief time.
Next: How people search the Web
Notice: Copyright
All materials are copyright 2008 by Ami Isseroff. All rights reserved. These pages may not be reproduced in any
form in electronic or printed media without express written permission from the author.
