Basic Principles of SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of making your web site irresistible to search engines. Search engines sort sites by algorithms that consider a page's content, meta tags, URL, incoming links, and site history to decide how important and relevant a page is. The search engine's decision determines how high up the search engine result page your web page appears when someone searches for a relevant keyword. Pages that use these principles to do well when measured by search engines' algorithms are called "Seo friendly." Most browsers do not look past the first page or two of results, so it is absolutely essential to your web site's success to get into the top ten or twenty results for the keywords most important to your site.

How do you use SEO to rise higher in the search results? First, you decide which keywords you plan to compete for. Ranking well for a general term like "coffee" is everyone's dream, but almost impossible to do; you will probably find that the more specific the keywords, the easier it is to rank well. "Coffee beans" is a more specific keyword, but "Blue Mountain coffee beans" is better, and "roasted Blue Mountain coffee beans" is excellent. When competition is too high, you may need to use an even longer keyword phrase, like "roasted Blue Mountain coffee beans mail order."

Once you have a list of keywords, retool each page to target one keyword apiece. The best practice is to put the keyword in the page's file name, title, and description meta tag. (The keyword meta tag, despite the name, is irrelevant to good SEO. It was so overused that search engines generally ignore it now.) Any anchor text that points to the page should also include the keyword, and the main content on the page itself should repeat the keyword a certain number of times. The optimum number of times a keyword should be repeated in the body of the page is one of the more delicate parts of good SEO; search engines alter their algorithms frequently to weed out spam, so one month the most SEO friendly keyword weight is 12%, then it drops to 8%, then the next year the percentage is down to 3%. Read reliable SEO forums and keep up to date on the latest SEO developments to know how often to mention a keyword in each of your web pages.

When you are done with the page content, consider your page design. Is your design code light, or will search engine spiders have to crawl through masses of unfriendly code to get to the content? If so, is there a way to move the code so it appears after the content? Are pages linked with Javascript and Flash, or do you have plain HTML links to and from each page? Have you implemented a spider friendly sitemap?

As you can see, making your site SEO friendly is not an abstruse, magical process. It is simply a matter of creating search engine friendly content that readers enjoy, and adding a few minor enhancements that are visible only to spiders. Spend some time on good forums and read recent articles, and you will quickly acquire the knowledge you need to make your own web site search engine friendly.