Of course being found is very important, and for most sites much of the visitor traffic comes from the search engines, especially Google.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a big buzzword when it comes to creating and publicizing websites, but what does it actually involve?
The most important aspect is making your site accessible to the search engines, so they can easily index all your content.
Once a search engine has your content it has to decide what the most important keywords and topics are so it can include your pages in the search results.
Many search engines then find out who links to your site, and what keywords and phrases are on those pages that people are likely to search for.
It then then pools all this information together, and using their formula decide which sites should be at the top of the results.
When we optimise a site for the search engines, there are several steps we can take to ensure good visibility for your site:
- The link structure (urls) of the site should be easily readable for the search engines and should contain keywords relevant to the site where possible. This also has the added affect of looking better too.
- The titles of pages (shown in the browser window) should be descriptive and include keywords relevant to the page and the site.
- Identify the most important keywords and phrases and make them more prominent to the search engines.
- Offer reciprical links with other resonating sites.
The most important thing is to try and put ourselves in the shoes of those that would be trying to find the site, what kind of things they would type in and how we can make the site come up for those keywords and phrases.
Like everything else we like to do things in balance, so making keywords more prominent should not interfere with the essence of the site.