An SEO Primer

From time to time we’re asked by new business owners or internet newbies: "What is SEO?". (Or, our favorite so far: "I heard there was a way to trick search engines into finding your site. Can you do that for me?"). This post is an introductory guide to answer those questions. Note: we’ve provided a really basic, simplified explanation to give some foundational knowledge.

What is search engine optimization?
When you create a website and put it online, search engines send out "bots" or "spiders" to crawl your site. These electronic spiders look at your website and do their best to interpret what it’s about. Then they report back to the search engine with their findings. The search engine then "indexes" your site according to those findings. So if you’re a pizza store and the spiders realize it, then the search engines will file you under "pizza" in their electronic database. When someone searches for the word "pizza" in the search engine, your site will come up.

But the search engines don’t just return a random search result for a searched word or phrase. Google (and now many other sites) rank the search results based on authoritativeness. They figure that the most authoritative sites should come first; and the less authoritative the sites are, the lower they should appear on the rankings. You may have a pizza site, but if you’re not showing up very high on the rankings, Google might consider other sites to be more authoritative than your site.

When you "search engine optimize" your site, you are building it and adding content in a way that helps the spiders understand what your site is about and makes it easier for the search engine to know how to file it. And, you are designing your site to demonstrate how authoritative it is.

So, here are some elements that search engine spiders measure. You should be aware that not all elements are measured by all search engines, and some put different weightings on each element in their own search algorithm. And, some search engines (like Google) keep their exact algorithm a secret.

Meta tags. Meta tags were once a popular way to optimize a site and guide the spider’s thinking. But they were abused and are now barely used. The "keyword" meta tag is probably not used by Google at all, and the "description" meta tag is used to describe your site in a search result but may or may not be used by the spider itself.

Alt tags. Alt tags are today’s meta tags! Alt tags are pieces of text that you can include with images that are embedded on your site. The thinking here is that if you are putting pictures on your site, they’re likely about your content and therefore the Alt tags will describe the picture.

Keywords. When spiders notice similar words used over and over, that helps them understand what your site is about. (If they see "pizza" again and again, it’s likely that you have a pizza site). If keywords aren’t used enough, spiders can miss it. If they are used too much, search engines consider your site "spam". Most people feel that the keyword "sweet spot" is 3% to 4%. So if your keyword is "pizza", you’ll use that word 4 times in 100 words. Unfortunately, this is abused by many site owners who will forgo readable content for "keyword stuffed" articles that barely make sense. (4% doesn’t sound like much but when your keyword is "Chicago Deep Dish Pizza Pizzeria" it can get tiresome to read that at 4% density.

Backlinks. Google was ground-breaking in their use of backlinks. When they created their search algorithm, they asserted that every link from a site back to your site is a "vote" for the credibility of your site. The more people who are linking to you, the more credible (i.e., authoritative) you are. This has been revised over the years because it, too, has been abused through link farms. However, when your site gets legitimate links from high quality websites, you’re more likely to be considered an authoritative site.

These are among the most talked about and the easiest for newbies to influence. However, there are many more factors, including site structure, site maps, valid code, and more. You can find a lot of helpful guidance here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

The bottom line is this: Start by building your site for people. Do a good job of creating high quality content. There is so much competition out there, and many of them are highly focused on SEO, you are better off to think about your human customers and then incorporate legitimate SEO practices into your site over time.

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