Search Engine Optimization...

Fact: 80% of all internet users find what they want through search engines!

Why do I care?

Search engines use different algorithms to determine who will rank at the top of page a for a particular keyword, when a potential customer types that keyword in. How well you have optimized your web site depends on how high up the ranks in a search page you will be displayed.

Ecommerce web sites need a good rank and often supplement natural search engine rank with paid advertising to improve their odds. Often website address' are advertised on cars, trucks, tv and in the paper, these are a great way of getting your website name out there.

Many business' do not need to rank well at all with the search engines as they use their website as more of a tool. It may have the location of your business on it or it may have technical information on it for people to consider. Sometimes a business can only service the local town or city so search engines are of little or no importance.

How does it work?

OK if you've read this far you deserve to know...

A few of the factors considered in every page are these

Every page in a website has some or one keyword that will attract a search engine when someone types that word in. In an easy world we would simply type in 'widget' a hundred times at the bottom of the page and every search engine would give us page one position one for 'widget'. Unfortunately search engines are MUCH smarter than that so when designing a site these things are taken into account...

Does the html code...
Has same color text and background
Has tiny text
Has immediate keyword repeats
Uses controls
Uses frames
Uses external JavaScript
Uses internal JavaScript
Uses external VBScript
Uses internal VBScript
File robots.txt disallows spidering

Below are many more examples of considerations to make. This whole page re presents approximately 20% of the total considerations needed to optimize every page of a website to make it suitable for search engines.

In the title
First tag in the <HEAD> tag
Characters in Title - how many?
Words in Title
Stop words in Title
Keyword frequency in Title
Keyword prominence in Title
Keyword weight in Title

and then

Characters in META Description
Words in META Description
Stop words in META Description
Keyword frequency in META Description
Keyword prominence in META Description
Keyword weight in META Description

Plus

Number of META Keywords tags
Words in META Keywords tag
Keyword frequency in META Keywords
Keyword prominence in META Keywords
Keyword weight in META Keywords

and more

Redirect
META Robots
No index
No follow
No archive

and

Bold keywords in Body
Underlined keywords in Body
Keyword frequency in Body
Keyword prominence in Body
Keyword weight in Body
Keyword at the beginning of Body
Keyword at the end of Body
First heading on the page (H1-H6)
Keyword frequency
Keyword prominence
Keyword weight
All headings
Headings on the page
Headings containing the keyword
Keyword frequency in all headings
Keyword weight in all headings