Web traffic is largely a product of search engine queries and results. It’s a fact. Viral marketing can spawn amazing results, but the normal avenue through which most people reach a business website is through search engine queries and results. If you want to get in front of readers, you need to have page results high in a search listing for a particular keyword or series of keywords. If you’re on the third page of results, most readers will never get to your page. How can you achieve a high page rank? Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a big part of this process.

Keywords and Page Rank – the background details.

Before you can understand search engine optimization, you need to understand the basics of how search engines work. When you type words into a search engine and hit the button, the search engine ignores some common words (like the, and, to) and searches its indexes for references to the important words in your query: keywords. Web pages that reference all of your keywords get priority, followed by websites that reference fewer of your keywords. Search engines also weigh other factors to determine the order in which it displays results. (It’s also important to note that search engines can only reference pages that they’ve indexed, but I’ll save that for another article.)

For example, if five Web pages all reference all of your keywords, but one page has thirty inbound links, the search engine recognizes those inbound links as value and that page would come up at the top of your search. This is the page rank. Many factors come into play when a search engine is determining your page rank, but this is a very simplified explanation of how search engines work.

What is SEO?

What is this SEO stuff anyway? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of analyzing current search engine criteria and making sure your website scores high in all categories. The purpose of this exercise is to get you a higher page rank; the better you score on a search engine, the higher up in the search results your page displays. Some people pay for the top results by becoming sponsors or paying for expensive marketing campaigns, but you can achieve high page ranks even without paying for advertising if you utilize effective SEO practices.

Why you need SEO.

Your page rank for a particular keyword depends on several important factors, but one generality is true: the higher your page rank, the better. If yours is the first website that comes up in a search, you’ll get exponentially more clicks than the second page, and the second gets more clicks than the third, and so on. Average people don’t click on more than a few pages unless they don’t find the information they seek, in which case they may continue looking. If you’re on the second page of results, many people who do a relevant search will never even see your site.

That means its vital that you get your website as high as possible in the list of page ranks, in order to ensure that as many people as possible see your site.

The basics of good SEO.

SEO varies somewhat from search engine to search engine, as different search engines have different criteria for ranking pages. However, many SEO best practices apply to multiple search engines, so it’s easy to capitalize on good SEO. SEO depends on a variety of factors: the keywords in your page, the page title, your headers and the content in your page, and your overall Web presence.

Content alone is a huge driving force in SEO. You want your keywords to appear enough times so that the search engine recognizes them, but not so many times that they overwhelm your readers; the best keyword SEO is organic, so it reads nicely to human readers but search engines still like the text. This is largely a function of where you place the keywords and how you use them. If you use the keywords too many times, search engines will actually assign your content a lower value, as they’re designed to penalize pages that attempt to manipulate the search engine results. Organic ranking is always the best.

Beyond content, though, other factors influence your page’s SEO. Inbound linking is a huge factor in SEO. The more places that link to your website, the better search engines like your page. Search engines equate links with value, and the more links you have, the more valuable your content must be. Therefore, building inbound linking is key to differentiating your content from your competitors’ pages.

Why you should hire an expert for good SEO.

SEO is a constantly-changing target. Search engines update their algorithms and criteria as people find ways to try to manipulate them. Search engines provide value by linking to high-quality, high-value content. Search engines don’t want to link to low-quality, poor content – people won’t be satisfied with the results, and may have to go to another search engine to find better results.

What this means for you is that you’re better served by hiring an expert to provide you with content that has high SEO value than trying to learn all the intricacies of SEO yourself. To learn good SEO practices, you’d need to constantly be researching the industry, and you’d need to be a near-expert in many aspects of Web design, marketing and content creation. If you hire an expert, on the other hand, all you have to do is describe your goal, and the expert can create SEO content to help your website achieve the best possible pagerank.

Beware of hiring the wrong SEO firm.

However, you should beware of hiring large SEO firms that charge you an arm and a leg for services you don’t need or already have. I recently consulted with one of my Web clients about his site, and he told me he was considering hiring an SEO firm to improve his page rank. I told him to send me his proposal and I’d evaluate it for him – decide whether or not it was worth what the company was charging – and was appalled at what he sent.

The company was charging outrageous prices for many services that he either already had or didn’t need, and he had no idea, because they couched the proposal in technical language. I’m currently working on an article about the dangers of SEO firms and how to select an SEO provider: look for that article on Monday, January 18th.

I regularly write SEO content for a wide range of clients – everything from articles to web page content. If you want SEO content, feel free to contact me using the Contact page above and I’d be happy to discuss your project.