The SEO Once Over

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one component of interactive marketing. SEO is the process of gaining top positioning in the search engines by developing your site with highly relevant content and legibility for both search engines and searchers. Sometimes referred to as “organic listings,” as opposed to paid or sponsored.

Search engine marketing has evolved from the early days of meta tags, keyword population and hidden code. SEO techniques now focus on enhancing the overall value of the site to search engines and searchers based on relevance, navigability and popularity. Search engine developers, led by Google in the late 1990’s, found that searchers recognized quality search results and remained loyal to those sites. Less and less, the trickery exhibited by sly webmasters garner the success that legitimately relevant and easily navigable sites see.

SEO Terms of Relevance and Popularity:

Keywords: The search phrases or target words that your consumers use to find your products and services. These should be 1 – 3 word phrases, but get into the mind of your consumer. In fact, Overture and Google offer keyword phrasing assistance tools. Be specific, for example, "New York Lawyer" is geographically targeted, but if you only practice personal injury law in New York, try "New York auto accident lawyer" or locally target "car accident lawyer".

Optimization of website: Implementing search engine friendly design by eliminating frames and large amounts of flash. The goal should be to optimize your text for searchers. In addition, the website’s page structure, headers, alt tags, anchors and links should be built and titled to consistently aid your keyword relevance.

Backlinks: Increasingly more important as an indicator of the value of your content, these links from one unique URL to another help search algorithms determine your popularity. Link building campaigns have become a new business.

Indexing: Search engines (spiders or robots) crawling through websites and compiling full-text databases

Page Rank: Once you have received a backlink from a website that has been indexed by the Google spider, your receive a ranking (see Google Toolbar) based on the links in and out of your site, and the importance of the sites housing those links. A PR exceeding 5 indicates a well-trafficked site.

Algorithm: The equation the search engines use to evaluate site positioning and rank for the websites they index.

Search Engine Inclusion: Submitting gratis or paying an annual fee or semi-annual fee to search engines to add your site within their database for return in search result. This can take a few weeks and often includes regular updates for the next year.