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SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the electronic beautification to your website. That is, your content and coding skills will benefit your site for non-human readers.

What is SEO?

SEO is a current big buzzword for internet marketers. It is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to your website from search engines. The traffic is directed to your site via “natural” querry of targeted key words as opposed to paid placement or advertising. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site.

Search Engines 

I suppose we should digress a little and explain search engines in order for everyone to understand the reasoning behind the optimization. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN use web crawlers, sometimes called bots or spiders, to crawl the internet looking for links and pages and sites to index and add to their growing registry.

The bots gather information from websites and search engines use that information in conjunction with complex algorithms and data based on what users search for to give your site relevance to their searches. Say what?

Based on what information the bot can glean from your site, the search engine can categorize your site for future searches. When a person types in “chainsaws in Tacoma, WA” hopefully Powered Agriculture shows up near the top of that list. Moving up that list is what SEO is about.

What do you need to do?

Your SEO efforts may involve coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering your site. Other more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content, and ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.

The fact of the matter is there are hundreds of things to constantly work on to improve your site’s rankings. Some of them will be temporary improvements, some will be long-lasting, and still others can be harmful. I will focus on a few basic items that you can work on to improve your site’s ranking and to get you thinking like a Search Engine Optimizer.

1. Internal Navigation
While search engines are getting better at crawling complex websites, you need to make it as easy as possible. Limiting your use of JavaScript, Image Maps and session IDs are just a few of the pitfalls many site designers miss. Create your navigation in cascading style sheets (CSS) or standard text. One of the best tips I’ve seen to see if your navigation is easily crawlable is to check the Google cache of your site and click on the link “Click here for the cached text only.” If you can see your links in hyperlinked form you are probably ok. This may be the most universal issue I see as a problem on even the most “professional” websites. Even if you do this and nothing else, you could see big improvements on your site rankings.

2. Links
In an ideal world you could design a website full of great content and it would rank well. Unfortunately search engines rely on some sort of linking weight in their algorithm to verify the quality of your site. What this means is build your site and let everyone know. Contribute in blogs, forums, and message boards relating to your website. Write articles. Become an authority on what your website deals in and before you know it you will be getting those one-way links without even asking for them. Relevant one-way links are ultimately the link you want.

3. Content
You can’t just have a website made up of images and one sentence per page. Text is the meat that search engines devour. The more relevant text you can write on each page the better it is for the search engines and the better it is for your end users. One thing to remember here is not to squeeze too many subjects onto one page.

Separate your content into logical breaks as much as possible.Keep in mind that natural language querries, personalization, and locale are becoming more important in search engine algorithms. Having keywords about your location or using common names for plants and not just the latin are things to build with.

4. Code Bloat and Download Time
You might be a beginner so what do you know about coding websites, let alone inline CSS or JavaScript? Bottom line, your either going to need to learn or find someone who does know. No alternatives here. It is extremely important to have valid and easy to crawl code. Your site may work and be visible to humans, but I see websites all the time that are ridiculous when it comes to valid code. So, if you can fix this, then do it. The second part is to make sure your pages download in a reasonable time. Once again, you will find slow websites ranking all the time, but it needs to be fixed not only for the search engines but for your end users.

There are no “good” ways for getting around these rules and reasons. No long-term gains to be made by cheating the algorithms. You may hear about black hat tactics such as link farms and keyword stuffing, but as search engines become increasingly complex they will learn to disregard these tactics and some have even penalized websites for their use.

Build a user-friendly website full of great sincere content and promote it everywhere you do business. It will take time and constant updating to increase your sites visibility. That’s why search engines love blogs, because they are full of fresh content and often have multiple inbound links. Use the information above and build a cross-promoting electronic landscape with a business site, blog, and even a forum.