Search Engine Optimization is the effort put into your website’s structure and content to achieve higher search rank without paying for (PPC) pay per click advertising.
In the beginning, search engines would crawl the entire internet, jumping to a new webpage by available links creating a cross-linking web. Behind each search engine are banks of computers that work together to stack the search results based on the number of times search terms appears on each website. In 1998 all that changed with Google. Google was different by thinking a websites rank should be primarily determined by the number of other sites that link to your site. The more links to your site, the more important it probably is, therefore, it should rank higher in Google’s search results. Google called this approach Page Rank after one of the founders, Larry Page.
Other than backlinking, a few other criteria are used to rank your site with many search engines. The occurrence of keywords in your page content matching the keywords used in the search. For this reason it helps to also match the keywords (150 character limit) in the meta description in the head of the document to keywords in the body. This takes site optimizing to the next level: page optimizing. Meta title should be less that 70 characters including spaces. Pages should serve a purpose and cover one topic. Like an athletes body, ranking highly in search results typically requires regular maintenance.
Google is the leading search engine and paves the way for setting the standard with how searches behave. They constantly change and update their algorithms to prevent dishonest strategies on ranking high in search results and provide accurate search results. Over the years this has led to some big changes, and some big upsets with web designers and website owners alike. Meta keywords are no longer heavily weighed if at all. It was discovered some sites would cram as many keywords in as they could think of, hoping some would match a search and they would show up in the search result. Not all behavior changes negatively affect websites, in fact Google now allows meta descriptions to sound more like a sales pitch. Having links on your website to pages that contain more information on a subject is highly recommended, but use caution that all links must be done correctly. Broken links can really hurt your search ranking.
Whether you make efforts to improve your SEO monthly or not it is vital to install analytics on all of your pages. Analytics consists of a database and a snippet of code that is placed on pages that you would like to keep tabs on. Google offers a completely free analytics package. You can keep track of how many visitor your site gets, how many visitor each page gets, what percent of your visitors come from search engines and if they bounced back to the search results page because your website didn’t have the information they were expecting to find. Analytics is a very effective tool for measuring your websites positioning and if your SEO efforts are working or not. Contact Goldmine Dezine today to setup a free consultation for your website’s search engine optimization.