Search Engine Optimization
There is plenty of information on the web when trying to define and understand what exactly search engine optimization is, and why it matters. We can't explain it all here in these few paragraphs, our goal here is to briefly explain the steps and processes we adhere to, why we think every website should abide to the process we use, and the benefits it provides to you and your business.
To talk about SEO is basically to talk about optimizing a website's framework and content to be more easily visible and indexed by the search engines, and then to tweak it to rank at its optimal performance. There is no secret formula, there is no magic button to push, there is however much imagination and experimentation required.
WebLeaseUSA uses a very strict White Hat SEO approach, which is covered in our SEO policy. Our design and development is focused mainly with on-page optimization and content relevance as we will describe below.
A few more of the basics include:
How Search Engines Operate
Search engines have a short list of critical operations that allow them to provide relevant web results when searchers use their system to find information.
- Crawling the Web
Search engines run automated programs, called "bots" or "spiders", that use the hyperlink structure of the web to "crawl" the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web. Estimates are that, of the approximately 20 billion existing pages, search engines have crawled between 8 and 10 billion. - Indexing Documents
Once a page has been crawled, its contents can be "indexed" - stored in a giant database of documents that makes up a search engine's "index". This index needs to be tightly managed so that requests which must search and sort billions of documents can be completed in fractions of a second. - Processing Queries
When a request for information comes into the search engine (hundreds of millions do each day), the engine retrieves from its index all the documents that match the query. A match is determined if the terms or phrase are found on the page in the manner specified by the user. For example, a search for car and driver magazine at Google returns 8.25 million results, but a search for the same phrase in quotes ("car and driver magazine") returns only 166 thousand results. In the first system, commonly called "Findall" mode, Google returned all documents which had the terms "car", "driver", and "magazine" (they ignore the term "and" because it's not useful to narrowing the results), while in the second search, only those pages with the exact phrase "car and driver magazine" were returned. Other advanced operators (Google has a list of 11) can change which results a search engine will consider a match for a given query. - Ranking Results
Once the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the engine's algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query. They sort these on the results pages in order from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select. - PageRank
The term "PageRank" is commonly misinterpreted as how a website ranks when a specific keyword or keyword phrase is searched in Google or in other search engines. Actually, PageRank was developed by the founders of Google as a method to determine the importance of a website based off the quantity and quality of links coming into your website (on a scale from 0 - 10) from other external websites. It also takes into account the relevance of those external websites to yours as well as the words used in the anchor text of the links. How successful your website might be for specific keywords is not measured by PageRank. Having a higher PageRank score can definitely boost your Search Engine Result Page position for your keywords. It is important to remember that there is no one simple method that can quickly boost a website's PageRank, but that is also why it is such an effective technology. The best way to earn a higher PageRank score is to ensure you have the most informative and user friendly website in the industry, overtime it will earn the incoming links from other websites if their owners view your site as an informative source for a particular service or product.
Although a search engine's operations are not particularly lengthy, systems like Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, and MSN are among the most complex, processing-intensive computers in the world, managing millions of calculations each second and funneling demands for information to an enormous group of users.
On-page Factors
Put simply, when search engines look at your page, they're trying to figure out what the page is about, so that they can match the page to searches for the same kind of thing. The general goal of on-page optimization is to optimize the "aboutness" of page content. This essentially means arranging the content so that the target search terms feature prominently compared to less relevant content.
If you were a search engine, how would you determine what a page is about?
Obviously, you'd start by looking for special terms and phrases. You'd look past the ordinary words like "and, but, then etc.", but any meaningful terms will stand out as indicative of the subject of the page/site.
Sometimes the page has a focused, highly specific subject. Other times it seems to be about lots of related things. You'll often find links to other pages (or sites), which give an indication of what those pages are about too (off-page factors).
So if you're trying to top the charts for the search phrase "Web Designer small business Oregon", how do you make your home page (for example) more about that?
Thinking from the search engine's point of view, and asking a variety of "All other things being equal..." questions, it seems pretty obvious that the following would increase the specific "aboutness" of the page/term.
When someone performs a search in Google, they want information. It is Google's job to provide the best source of information in the shortest amount of time. That being said, it is logical that Google will provide the most informative, organized, and up-to-date websites first, and the least informative, oldest websites with outdated code, last. Don't worry about having too much information, in Google's eyes there is no such thing. So think to yourself, "Is my website the most informative and organized website out of all the other websites in my industry through out the entire world for these specific keywords?" That is a very big questions, and is why websites are always a work in progress, because you will always have competition.
The places to position key words in your HTML have a hierarchy of importance, using proper grammar, W3C validating code, having "short and sweet" URLs and domain names, and having unique text content all will definitely have an effect in how Google decides to rank your website. There are many other factors, and its always changing. The precise balance of power is different for varying search engines, and the algorithms are continually tweaked, so while full-time SEO pros make it their job to get as close as they can to the secret numbers, no one really knows for sure.
When Google launched, it focused more on the real evidence derived from what pages really say than what they claim to say. Prior to Google, meta tags were taken as significant, but Google caused a sea change when it started prioritizing off-page factors and real content above metadata. Don't overstuff your content with too many repetitions of key terms. It is important to stress that search engines are looking for real content, not artificially enhanced content, which means a natural balance of search terms to the fiber of other content.
The trick, of course, is to figure out how much is too much, and the only way to know (as SEO pros do) is to run continual tests using dummy content that is not business-critical. But don't spend your time worrying about not having the #1 spot ranking for your keywords in Google, there's little point getting loads of traffic to a page when the page content is not useful, readable, or helpful.
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