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Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of building a site in a way that is attractive to the search engines. The more attractive your site the higher it will be listed on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) and the more traffic will be sent to your site.

Why Is SEO Important?Search Engine Results Page Heat Map

The right position of an "ad" on the SERPS can make the difference between getting the click and not getting the click. It can mean getting thousands of visitors or none. SEO marketers have even developed a "heat map" to show which ads on the results page get the most clicks.

The Red areas get the most clicks moving towards the blue with white areas getting very few if any clicks.

Getting traffic is crucial to your sites' success. Without a steady stream of qualified visitors to your site even a great site may be doomed to failure. It's definitely not a case of "build it and they will come." You must build it correctly to get the free traffic that will insure your success.

Understanding the factors that determine how your site gets traffic is an important part of online marketing. Both on-page and off-page criteria must be optimized for maximum free traffic. And free traffic is of course your most cost-effective way to grow your business.

The Search Engines have your success pretty much in their hands. Yes it is possible to get traffic without relying on the SEs. Perhaps you already have a strong offline brand and people know it well enough to search for it. But to extend your reach throughout the global marketplace you'll need to build your site in a way that is inviting to the search engines.

A strong natural ranking in the search engines guarantees a steady stream of free prequalified traffic. They're prequalified because they have chosen your listing over the others. This means they see something they like. They have raised their hands and said I'm ready to buy what you offer or they're at least ready to hear more. This is any marketers dream come true. Free qualified traffic... no signage, no newspaper ads, no brochures or business cards to hand out.

Making Your Site Attractive To Spiders

So how do you make your web site attractive to the search engines to get high-ranking listings?

First let's take a look at just what a Search Engine does...

For Google to be successful it must give it's "customers" what they are looking for...relevent results to their query. If Google doesn't return the most contextually accurate, helpful listings then that visitor will go to one of their competitors, Yahoo or MSN.

To come up with the best search results Google must know the content on every page on the internet. So to analyze a web site Google sends out an automated "robot" that analyzes every page on the web. These robots or "spiders" crawl every page on a site to determine the relevancy and quality of the content.

As the SE spiders analyze the content they look for cues that indicate the main features, content and the structure of the site to see how potentially useful the site might be. They look at things like meta tags, anchor tags, internal links, incoming links, outgoing links, and of course the textual copy on each page.

Making your site is "spider friendly" is a key component of SEO. A spider "sees" your site much like a visually impaired person would. It can only analyze textual elements and the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) tags that add meanging to the content.

A spider sees the HTML head, body, paragraph, hyperlink and meta description tags and tries to derive importance from this "markup." It know that a "head1" tag should have more weight than a "paragraph" tag. It knows that a link coming from another site that already has strong authority in that niche implies that this site might have value too.

Certain types of web structures are more difficult for a spider to see and in fact may be invisible to a spider. Pages with logins, frames, Flash elements, and URLs with session IDs, are all difficult for a crawler to decipher and may be ignored or in some cases actually be "black marks" on your site's report card. Images and videos cannot be evaluated accurately because they are again not seen by the spiders in the same way that humans see them.

Link Popularity

As Google evaluates your linking structure it makes judgements about your site. If it sees that other sites are linking to your site, it judges your site to be a winner; therefore, it deserves a boost in rankings. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. People link to good sites, not bad ones. All major search engines place some emphasis on link popularity in their ranking algorithms.

There appear to be two main types of links that work best to increase your link popularity

The point is... quality matters. Links from sites that focus on topics that have nothing to do with your site probably won't help you win any link popularity contests. Link only with sites are are valuable to YOUR visitors.

Keep It Real

Some SEO specialists believe that attracting spiders is purely a science. Put your keywords in the right place, and have enough H1 tags, and get enough in-bound links and the SEs will rank you highly. They think the Google system can be "tricked" into getting high rankings.

Google keeps getting smarter and smarter. It's algorithms become more "human" all the time. Pretty soon they will be able to judge a site in much the same way we do... does it have useful, relevant content that helps me or not?

So what's an online marketer to do?

Build a site that YOU would find useful. Create great content and give your visitors solutions to their problems. In other words, just keep it real and relevant to them. In the long run that's what will make a site popular in the SE's eyes.

Keyword Popularity

Another important factor on getting good rankings is the popularity of your content. If a search term is in demand then certainly many more people will be searching on that term so your volume of potential visitors is bound to be larger.

Analyzing keyword popularity and search volume is therefore a key ingredient of SEO. Such tools as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Site Build It!'s Brainstorm It! tool, provide great help in this area. Building pages based around the most in-demand keywords in your niche lets you take advantage of keyword popularity to attract traffic.

Adding more and more pages around these "long-tail" keywords will also attract more and more visitors that may come for one reason and find other reasons to stay once they see your site. Ultimately the more pages your site has the more traffic it will attract.

If you would like to have your site evaluated to see just how well it is optimized please contact us. If you would like a complete audit of your sites current status and recommendations on how to improve your rankings BitCom would be glad to provide a complete analysis. Contact us here if we can help you.