What's involved in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

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What's involved in Search Engine Optimization?

Like any promotional campaign, there are several integral components to a winning SEO strategy. SEO involves carefully blending and balancing those components to achieve exactly the right results. No two campaigns will ever be identical and in fact, as in your other marketing activities, differentiation is the key to success.

Most SEO campaigns will involve some blend of the same main elements of your site:

Web Site Structure
Web Site Content
Web Site Format

1 - Web Site Structure

The way your site is built plays a large role in your online success. Taking advantage of structural elements such as page-titles, meta-tags, file-names, heading-tags and other tags will provide huge benefits in terms of search engine rankings. The search engines will read your site to see if you've used those elements (and how well you've used them). Your resulting index rank will depend on whether you've taken the best advantage of these built-in optimization opportunities.

The manner in which you've organized the site is also a structural issue and can make a huge difference when it comes to the search engines finding your important information (and thereby your customers finding it too).

Is your site organized so that search engines (and visitors) can easily find your pages?
Have you used the best linking methods to take visitors from one page to the next?

These all play a vital role in getting you to the top of the search engines.

2 - Web Site Content

We define "content" as everything on a webpage that is viewable and readable by either a visitor and/or a search engine. The arrangement of the content is part of the site's structure and is important in its own right as described above. But the actual content material itself is even more important. If you've ever heard the expression "content is king," then you'll have some idea of its importance here.

To be well ranked, your site needs to provide ample good, relevant information that is tailored to the reading habits of the search engines. This means providing subject-focused text, repetition of keywords, text-based internal links to other pages on your site, clear & descriptive headings, and more. A well-written site means a well-ranked site.

Here's why:

The search engines are in competition with each other for market-share of the expanding search audience and to win that competition they are continuously striving to deliver the best product to their customers: the search engine user. Therefore, the sites that provide the most relevant content are the ones that the search engines are going to rank the highest. Consequently, those are the sites they'll provide to their search customers.

3 - Web Site Format

The way in which your site is published to the web can play an important role too. Chiefly this relates to the two main formats, Dynamic sites vs. Static sites.

Dynamic pages are those that are created uniquely for each visitor based on various factors related to the visitor's preferences, their choices or even the type of computer or browser they are using. Dynamic pages give each visitor a unique experience at your site and allow superb flexibility and customization of your company's information so that it is tailored specifically to them As a result, your pages can look different and contain different information each time they are viewed. Unfortunately, because of this capacity for diversity, dynamic pages are difficult for the search engines to visit and index. Some search engines won't even try to index them because there are simply too many possible versions of each page and they can't index them all.

Static pages are those that are created to look the same and contain the same information for each and every visitor. These pages can be easily edited by your webmaster, but between revisions they will always look the same which makes them very easy for the search engines to read and index. Static pages are the original building blocks of the internet (.html pages) and as such, are the basic foundation of a successful SEO strategy.

If your site uses a dynamic format (and there are many good reasons why dynamic might be the best choice for your site depending on your business) you will still need to have some means for the search engines to be able to find and read something static or constant on your site. Creating a handful of static (.html) pages that the search engines can rank and that can serve as entrance-pages to your dynamic site is typically the best way to accomplish this.

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