The Importance of SEO
The purpose of having a web site is so people can find and read your work. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process where your site is analyzed and then modified to increase your web site’s rank on the search engines, like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Your web site’s ranking on a key word search is essential to directing traffic to your site, and proper SEO ensures that your web site is available to the search engines.
In a keyword search, search engines in particular send out what are called web crawlers, also known as spiders, or robots (bots). “Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code.”**
Companies can invest tens of thousands of dollars on a web site, but if it has not been properly optimized for the search engines, then your web site will not be found nor will it be indexed. If your web site is not indexed, then your money will be spent in vain because web crawlers will simply bypass your site in a keyword search. If you are not investing in good search engine optimization for your company’s web site, not only will you lose exposure via web traffic, you will also lose money. SEO ensures accessibility to the search engines.
In order for your company to have success on the Web, hiring professionals to optimize your site is a vital marketing strategy that will increase your online presence, for businesses and nonprofits alike. Not only will proper optimization improve your ranking on the search engines, your company will also benefit in all the free advertising a higher-ranking web site experiences.
You should be just as competitive when optimizing your company’s web site as you are in your day-to-day business activities. Statistics show that internet users rarely, if at all, go beyond the third page when doing a key word search. This means that your site rank is essential to directing traffic to your site because your competitors are literally just a click away.
Understanding the importance of search engine optimization, Google has created a set of guidelines to consider.
Design and content guidelines:
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
- Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
The authors of this text co-own and operate a consultancy called SEO.com and an SaaS (software as a service) software company called Yield Software that are renowned leaders in search engine optimization.
