OPTIMIZATION Usability, accessibility and search engine optimisation articles
SEO Overview
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is much discussed on forums and blogs, with many articles and books being written. It is not an exact science because Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engine corporations like to keep their methods secret as they compete for domination. Google is used by far more people than other SEs and optimizing web sites so they show prominently in Google SERPs (search engine results pages) is now a full time job for some specialists. If your site appears near the top of a Google search, you are likely to get many visitors.
How Do I Get Top Position on a Google Search Results Page?
Let's pretend you are a small business based in Preston, Lancashire, producing laughter machines. We'll assume your laughing machines work really well, that you have great literature about them, that you are able to cope with the demand and that local customers have already bought them and like them. How do you find more customers on the web? Or, more to the point, how do your customers find you?
High Page Rank
Google will index your website and give it a Page Rank. If you have a high page rank you will appear near the top of the search results, provided you have optimised correctly. Page rank depends on various factors mainly the number of other web sites that link to yours. The idea behind this is that if you are popular, then your site is probably more worthy of a higher page rank than if nobody links to you. But how do you get known in the first place and why should people link to you?
Get Relevant Links
You could use various strategies such as emailing and asking relevant sites laughter related sites, contributing on relevant comedy forums, paying for links on prominent sites or getting listed in relevant but less prominent free directories. The key word here is 'relevant'. Google will not give much importance to links from so-called 'bad neighbourhoods' or 'link farms' but will give a lot of weight to a link from a relevant web page with a high page rank.
Create Unique Content
Another important consideration is to create content that is Google-friendly. If it is human friendly it is most likely to be robot friendly. So it should use relevant keywords, meaningful headings and be unique rather than a copy of something else. A knowledge of what search terms people are searching for is also very useful because you can then put some of these terms into your text and be found more easily.
Refine Your Keywords
Of course, many sites may be offering similar products and therefore using similar keywords. Your site will not be found if you use the same keywords as a high page rank site. However, if you use 'laughing machine preston' or 'laughter machine lancashire' you will be found by people using those terms and as people use the web more and more so they will understand how to refine their searches in such a manner so as to get more relevant results. So keywords such as 'cheeky chuckler mark 1' or 'rib tickler deluxe' could bring in just the customers you want as they discover that those machines are the ones they want.
Work Hard. Persevere.
Those are the basics and as you can see a lot of research and hard work has to be done to optimize your web site for search engines. You could pay a site that promises to get you to number 1 on Google but it will probably only get you there for some obscure search term. There are no easy cost-effective solutions - they all need some hard work - but with understanding and perseverance your site can become more prominent in search results.