Getting A Handle on Website Search Engine Optimization

Since many businesses are still clueless about search engine optimization (SEO) and what it involves I thought I would post part of a seminar I did at a trade show convention back in 2004. Hopefully, this will give business owners better insights into what is entailed in optimizing a website and why we do it.

How Do Search Engines Work?
In general, search engines use sophisticated software applications (called spiders or robots) to crawl the Internet and read web pages. Search engine robots find new web pages by following links from web page to web page and through people submitting their website address directly to the search engines. Each page read is then cataloged into a huge database. They then use very complex algorithms and computational formulas to determine which web pages they should list, which is based off of a page’s relevancy and popularity to the words typed in by a person performing a search. Search engine web page listings are commonly referred to as Search Engine Rank Position or SERP for short.

Search Engine Optimization
You can have a $500,000 website, but if no one can find it than you have wasted a lot of time and money. With millions and millions of websites today, getting lost in the sea of web pages is very easy to do. Since so many people use the search engines to find what they are looking for online, we must continually optimize our websites for better search engine listing postions to consistently drive potential online customers to our websites. Search engines are not only consumers resource guide but also many times their yellow pages today.

Search engine optimization is really about optimizing specific “sets of keywords” within the various pages and page elements to help your website achieve a higher search engine ranking positions (called SERPs). The exact sets of keyword phrases should mirror the words your targeted audience uses when performing a search. It should be noted, keyword optimizing strategies will differ between manufacturers looking for a more global targeted audience versus retailers interested only in connecting with their local online shoppers.

Although optimizing web pages may seem easy at first, it does take a lot of time, effort, industry knowledge and search engine expertise to really be effective. To make things more complicated, search engines are always tweaking their algorithms, adding new things to their listing mix, and smart competitors can visibly see your strategies and duplicate them. Plus, the search engine industry is constantly changing the playing field.

Also, no two search engines yield the same algorithmic results. So what works with one search engine may not produce the same results with another search engine, or may be slightly different from region to region. So what someone in California sees when doing a search may be slightly different than what someone in New York will see when conducting the exact same search.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases
Keywords and phrases are used to help the Search Engines determine exactly what a web page is all about. Search Engines reading all the text on a page will give more weight to words that are consistently repeated in the page title tag and within the page itself. This is commonly referred to as: “keyword density” and applies to individual pages as well as the overall web site.

At the same time, overuse of keywords within a page may penalize your overall rankings. Using too many different sets of keywords within the same page can confuse the search engine spider and cause your overall rank to diminish.

It is important to realize four things:

1. Search Engine robots only READ TEXT content!! They can NOT read graphics, flash, etc. and they ignore Javascript.
2. Search Engines cannot insert text into a form and click the submit button, so pages behind a form cannot be crawled by the search engines. For example, search engine robots cannot enter a zipcode and click the submit button to see store listings.
3. Do not overuse keywords and never try to be sneaky in your keyword strategies.
4. No one has real control over the Search Engine ranking position. It can change from day to day depending on the Search Engines algorithms and formulas. It is an ongoing job to keep good rank position for a specific set of keywords.

Keyword Phrases and Qualifiers
Most people use 2-3 or more words together when conducting a search. So it is important to optimize your keyword phrases within your web page for the words your targeted audience most often uses when searching for your products and services. Too often website owners tell their web developers to target very general keyword phrases. These general terms may not get you your true targeted audience (especially local audience) and can be extremely costly to obtain high search engine ranking positions. If all I sell is “hardwood flooring” I do not want everyone who searches with the keyword “flooring”, because chances are they are not in the market to buy a hardwood floor. Also, if I am a flooring store in “Maine” do I really want to bother interacting with people from “California”? To help pull our real targeted audience to our website we need to optimize all keywords and phrases with well thought out keyword qualifiers that mirrors what our targeted audience uses.

Adding qualifiers to keyword phrases will accomplish two things. This will help get a more targeted audience and it will be much easier to obtain a higher search engine rank position than using generic terms and the more competitive phrases. This is especially true for retailers who really only want to attract their local targeted potential buyers.

Geographic-related Qualifiers

If your business products and services are limited by defined geographic area, it is probably not worth going after highly competitive terms that don’t specify your specific region. For example, if you are a carpet store in “Atlanta, GA.” adding geographic qualifiers (in this case "Atlanta carpet store" or "Georgia plumbing supply") means you have a better chance of being listed on page #1 for that exact phrase (versus “carpet” by itself) which should also attract a much more targeted shopper to your website.

Descriptive Noun Qualifiers

The addition of a descriptive noun can take a keyword phrase that attracts a more general audience and transform it into a phrase that will attract the exact type of targeted traffic that you seek. As example, “hardwood flooring” is a very broad term and is very competitive between web sites looking for high rankings. Adding a descriptive noun modifier (such as “store”, “retailer” or “stores”) will help you target exactly the type of traffic you really want. The term “hardwood flooring store” is also much easier to obtain high ranking position than “hardwood flooring” and will probably get you a more targeted buyer who is seriously looking where to buy their hardwood floor.

Descriptive Adjective Qualifiers
Using descriptive qualifiers can also help you achieve high ranking positions with your targeted audience. If your business is strictly selling “round area rugs” than you can get a much more targeted audience for a lot less effort if you add “round” to the keyword phrase “area rugs”. This helps narrow your audience to those looking specifically for “round area rugs”.

Poor Quality Qualifiers
These are generally words (“free”, “advice”, “guide”) that attract the wrong type of audience that has no intention of going to your business or buying from you.  In the flooring industry we have specific words like “install” or “installing” that when used may target consumers looking for installation help after they have already made the flooring purchase at another store. If you are looking to drive consumers to your store to buy flooring you definitely don’t want to bother giving out free installation advice to every DIY consumer on the Internet.

Incoming Links
Google uses incoming links to web sites to determine how popular a web site may be for a given subject, or keyword phrase. This is referred to as: “Link Popularity”. In laymen terms what this means is every web site that links back to you gives you a popularity vote. The more popularity votes (incoming links) you receive the higher your ranking listing position will be in Google for a given search phrase. This is why the popular flooring manufacturers generally do well in rank position, everyone links back to them which increases dramatically their link popularity with Google.
Three important factors will also effect you link popularity:

1. What keywords are used within the link’s description. <a href=”http://www.mysite.com/”>Milwaukee Carpet Store</a>
2. An external page’s content relevancy to your website’s content is extremely important. A page link coming from the wrong content may have a negative effect to your website’s link popularity.
3. The page ranking of the page linking to your website can also be an important factor.
4. Authoritative websites, such as government websites are great sources to obtain a listing from and carry a lot of weight with the search engines, so do many major manufacturer and major online publication type websites.

*** Note: Although this is true today, these rules may change at any time.

Regardless, if incoming links gain you link popularity they will help get you more traffic. If you exchange links with other targeted web sites you will see more traffic and exchanging links between web site owners is almost always free.

Internal Links
The same rules apply to internal links pointing to other pages within your website. Use good keyword strategies within the link descriptions for all internal links.