Search engine optimization is the strategic process of improving your position in Google search results.  Of course when I say Google, I mean all search engines.  But as Google has become a verb for all website search, and now holds about 85% of search engine traffic, I’ll just say Google from here on out.  Sorry, Bing. 

 Step 1: Find Good Keywords

Suppose you are a lawyer with a local practice in Portland, Oregon.  You don’t want people to find you when they are searching for digital cameras.  You also don’t want someone in Atlanta who searches for “lawyer” to find you.  You want to show up with people search for “Portland Oregon lawyer”.  This may seem obvious but if you aren’t careful you can end up wasting your optimization efforts on people who will generate no new business for your company.

Who is your audience?  To begin this process you should determine your website’s target audience.  Is your site created for people in search of a lawyer or people in search of online legal research? 

What would they search for?  Brainstorm and generate a list of possible words and phrases your target audience might use to find a site like yours.

What else would they search for?  After you have created your initial list of possible search terms you should leverage web tools to expand your list to other terms you hadn’t thought of.  Google Business Solutions has multiple tools.  One will generate keywords based on the content of your site.  Another will give you other ideas for search terms based on your initial list.

What terms are most popular?  Now that you have an expansive list you should use web tools to determine which of your search terms are most popular.  Some of these variations might surprise you.  You might find that twice as many people search for “lawyer in Portland” as compared to “Portland lawyer”.  Google has multiple tools to analyze to help you refine your search term list.  Another resource is wordtracker.com.

What popular terms have the least competition?  You have a list of extremely targeted and popular search terms.  Unfortunately, some of those terms are also being targeted on many of the websites of your competitors.  Other terms on your list may be equally popular terms, but targeted by far fewer of your competition.  These are gold.  Less competition means it is easier to get to the top of search results.

 Step 2: Submit your site

Generally speaking Google, Yahoo, Bing, and all the other search engines crawl through the entire internet and index every page of every site they can find.  In some cases, especially with new websites, the search engines might not know your exist yet.  In that case, you should let each of the search engines know that you exist.  While it varies from site to site, there is usually a link to “submit your site to Google”.

Once all the engines know you exist there are steps you can take to make it as easy as possible for the engines to see all of your content.  This is accomplished by submitting an xml sitemap to the engines.  We will discuss sitemaps more in a future entry.

Step 3: Create Content

Now that you know what your target audience is searching for, the next step is to place those targeted terms throughout your website.  Google indexes every word on your site.  However, certain locations in the code are more heavily weighted in the search engine than others.  Some of those heavy hitters are listed below.

Website URL: The URL of your website should describe your organization as well as contain search terms.  If your website is PortlandOregonLawyer.com, you are very likely to show up towards the top of results when someone searches for “Portland Oregon Lawyer”.

Page Title: The page title is what shows up in the very top of your web browser.  If your browser has tabs it will be the text displayed in the tab.  On the article you are currently reading, the title is “What is SEO? | eclipsemediasolutions.com”.

Page name: The page name is the part of the webpage address that is specific to this page.  In this case the overall URL of the page is “eclipsemediasolutions.com/content/what-is-seo”.  Therefore the page name is “what is seo”. 

Image alt tags:  Search engines can only index text, not images.  To help describe what is shown in a picture there are alt tags.  They can be seen by hovering your mouse over an image.  If you hover over the blog header image you will, depending on your browser, see a box that says “eclipse media solutions”.

Link text:  The text of a link on your site is also heavily weighted.  If your site says “click here for details” as a link, Google is only indexing those four words.  Instead if your link said “details about SEO”, Google would then know that link has something to do with SEO. Be specific in naming your links.

Headers:  In HTML there are various ways to emphasize certain pieces of text.  One of those is to make it header text.  By doing so, you are telling Google that this text is particularly important.  As a result, Google weights the words in that header more heavily.

Step 4: Inbound Links

The last and most critical part of search engine optimization is to generate inbound links.  An inbound link is a link on a different site that directs readers to your website.  To continue the lawyer example, if I am a member of an industry organization, and that organization has a website that links to my website, that is considered an inbound link.  Inbound links are important because they are considered a vote of confidence for your site.  If a lot of people are linking to your website, it must be important.

Not all inbound links are created equal.  An inbound link from my cousin’s website about funny cat pictures will have less influence over my page ranking than a link from the New York Times.

How do I get inbound links?  In a general sense you get good inbound links by creating good content, and getting that content in front of other people.  When you begin creating and posting new content to your site regularly, you are giving visitors to your site more opportunities to link back to your site.  There are tools to help in this process.  We use a tool called AddThis.  You will see it as the button at the bottom of this entry that says, “Share”.  It provides users with various ways to share a link to this article with others.  They could share it on a social network like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.  They could also email it, or submit it to content sharing sites like Digg.com.

Need More Information?

There is a lot to soak up here.  In general search engine optimization is the process of getting to the top of search results for the search terms your target audience is searching for.  You get to the top by doing four things:

1. Finding the terms your target audience is searching for
2. Make it easy for search engines to index your site
3. Create content for your target audience
4. Encourage your site visitors to link back to your content

We at Eclipse Media Solutions have all the tools and experience to get your site optimized to its full potential. We offer a variety of different services at affordable prices. For more information, contact us.