SEO for Beginners

SEO is the name for the adjustments and additions you do to make your web site more attractive to search engines. Search engines use algorithms to decide how relevant and important a page is, using factors like the page's content, URL, meta tages, site history, and inbound links. 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." The average reader does not look past the first couple of pages of search results, often not even past the top two or three results, so appearing in the top ten or twenty results for your site's keywords is essential for getting traffic to your site.

How do you use SEO to do that? First, you select the keywords to target. 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 know which keywords you want your site to target, optimize each page to target a single 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.) The keyword should also appear in any anchor text on links pointing to the page, and should appear in the body of the page 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 the content of your site at the top of each HTML page, or do search engine spiders have to wade through unfriendly walls of code to find the body of the page? If the code is now at the top of the page, can you relocate it after the page body? 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. You only need to write content that your readers will enjoy reading, and add a few minor search engine optimization details intended for search engine spiders. Read search engine blogs and spend some time on reliable forums, and soon you will know everything you need to make your site SEO friendly.