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Anyone with a web page is naturally interested in making their page easy to find, and since search engines, such as Google, are what most people use for finding information on the web, getting a page ranked highly by these is of great interest to a lot of people. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique for doing this, and is far less mysterious than some people may lead you to believe.
Although the exact algorithm employed by search engines to rank web sites are well guarded company secrets, the parameters that go into these algorithms are generally well known.
The major parameters used to rank a web page are
All of these parameters, with the notable exception of the last point, can be easily modified by a competent webmaster.
The key to success is tied to relevance. Make sure the web pages have clear and consise text that can be easily read by a machine. Keep in mind that machines do not understand images, so avoid using images instead of text.
Once the visual text has been written and a clear and consise message has been produced, the web developer needs to put in HTML tags to make the text visible in a browser. Make sure tags are used correctly. Search engines understand HTML tags. They know about header tags such as H1, H2 and H3 and give words inside such tags special importance. The bold tag B is also recognized. A safe assumption is to think of search engines as fluent and familiar with every HTML tag. Make, therefore, sure the HTML tags are used correctly.
Use CSS to define the tags' visible atributes. CSS is a powerful tool to make standard HTML visibly appealing, and all web developers should be familiar and fluent in the use of CSS. Without CSS, the HTML of web pages become either bulky and hard to understand for search engines, or visually ugly, or both. The HTML of web pages that do not use CSS are generally not using HTML correctly. Important tags such as H1 and H2 tend to be left out, and the search engines are left with no good way of determining the importance of different parts of the text. There are no technical or visual excuse for not using CSS. CSS can in fact greatly increase a web page's visual appeal while simultanously improving the quality of the HTML
Make sure the TITLE tag is used correctly. Each page on a site should have a short and descriptive title. Make sure the title contains the two or three main keywords that define the page.
META tags exist solely for the purpose of helping search engines. Use these with great care. Using them incorrectly, can actually harm your web site's search engine ranking. Web pages that spam the META keyword property with huge lists of words will typically score badly with search engines. The correct use of keywords is to have no more than 15 of them. Each keyword must appear either in the visual text of the BODY or in the content of the META description property.
The META description should be a well formulated synopsis of the web page. Avoid superlatives. Be consise and to the point. Keep in mind that a well formulated description will appear next to the title tag when your page is listed by a search engine. Making it sound like it is a neutral description of your web page by the people at Google, say, is a good idea.
The address, or URL, of each web page should ideally contain descriptive keywords. If the web site has a page about cars, the URL should be something like www.mysite.com/cars/. Do not use numerical codes or other non-descriptive schemes for the URLs. Search engines look for keywords in URLs, so cryptic codes in the URL will do nothing to improve your page's ranking.
Links pointing out of your web pages should be relevant and up to date. Make sure you check them regularily. Pages do sometimes change content completely, and what once was an informative page, can suddenly contain inapropriate content.
Search engines work by following links through the web, just like a human browsing the internet, so no web page can be found if not linked to by any other page. Search engines use their own 'book marks' and follow links to find web pages. It is impossible for a search engine to find a web page unless it is linked to, directly or indirectly, from at least one web page already known to that search engine.
The number of links pointing to a web page is one of the parameters used by search engines to determine a page's popularity. However, not all links are equally valuable, and some links will actually lower a site's ranking. Links from web pages owned by internet spammers will weigh against the web pages pointed to. A link from a highly relevant web page is much more valuable than a link from an obscure irrelevant site.
Search engines are designed to automatically determine the content, popularity and relevance of pages found on the internet and are therefore dependent on well organized web pages and web directories like InfoNorway. Web directories are organized lists of links which are easy to navigate and where links to related pages are clustered together. This make webs directories particularely helpful to search engines. The better organized a directory is, the more valuable it is, and pages pointed to by quality directories are typically ranked higher than equivalent pages that are not found in such directories.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of links. Links are either directly pointing to the target web page, or pointing to a database that holds the target URL. Indirect linking through a database makes it possible to count clicks and make other useful calculations, and has become popular for this reason. However, most search engines do not understand or follow indirect links, so such links do not contribute to site ranking.
Indirect links can also be used to deceive search engines and are therefore not valued very highly, even by those search engines that do understand them.
Only direct links can contribute significantly to site ranking. This important fact is often ignored when people buy internet ads. People are fascinated by the ability to monitor the exact number of hits from an ad, and do not realize that such links do not improve web page ranking.
Google has an excellent ad program that uses indirect linking, and InfoNorway has used this a few times for several months at a time. InfoNorway associated its ads with the search word 'Norway' and this produced some 10,000 hits per month, which is very impressive. At 5 cent a hit, the ad campaigns cost $500 a month.
InfoNorway, which has offered direct link ads for more than five years, has seen that InfoNorway's sponsors have a clear tendency to come very high on search engines, often top of the list for the most relevant search words. Indirect links would have had no such effect. However, there is no way to document exactly how much the improved ranking is due to the direct links, and this makes it difficult to estimate the right price for direct link ads.
When considering direct link ads, one should ask oneself whether the ad provider has a site that it is desirable to be associated with. Search engines interpret direct links as a strong connection between two sites, so it is important that direct links are from relevant and well regarded sites. Only links from relevant sites will have a favorable effect on search engine ranking.
The improved search engine ranking that a web site can expect from a relevant direct link ad campaign must be taken into account when comparing the two alternatives. If the site offering the direct link campaign is well known and relevant, the benefit of such a campaign can be quite signifficant.
E.g. An indirect link campaign costing 5 cent per hit gives no search engine benefit and has therefore a hit per dollar ratio of 20. However, a direct link campaign that costs $500 per year and can document a hit rate of 1,000 per year, may improve search engine ranking enough to produce an extra 20,000 hits per year. Looking solely at the hits produced by the direct ads, one may conclude that the hit per dollar ratio is only 2, but this figure would be misleading, because it does not include the expected extra 20,000 hits resulting from the improved site ranking. The total hit per dollar ratio of the direct link campaign is not 2, but 42. In this example, the indirect link ads would be twice as expensive as the direct link ads.
Estimating the search engine effect of direct links is not easy, but there is no doubt that direct links from relevant sites are valuable. Faced with a choice between getting a direct or indirect link from a site, one should always choose a direct link. Those who are running indirect ad campaigns and know how much they are paying each month, are well advised to contact their ad providers and have them replace the indirect links with direct ones, even if this may require some additional payment.
There are a lot of companies offering search engine optimization, but such companies cannot do anything that competent webmasters can't do on their own. SEOs do not normally own or control relevant directories or search engines, nor are they in a position to buy cheap and relevant advertisement. The quality and content of web pages are always best managed by competent webmasters, and letting a third party take care of the important job of URL submission to relevant web pages is at best risky, and possibly very damaging.
SEOs can be of some help to webmasters by monitoring a site for errors and missing text, titles and tags. A short seminar or course on search engine visibility may also be of value. However, dedicated and focused attention to quality and relevance, combined with systematic and targeted URL submissions, will always be the best way to achieve good site visibility. There are no magic bullets, and SEOs who claim they have such bullets are most likely crooks. As with all investments in life, never buy anything you don't understand, and never buy anything that sounds like cheating.