Understanding Search Engine Optimization

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to any techniques applied to the code and/or content of a Web page that assists with the indexing of a site by search engines and the improvement of the site’s ranking order within them.

Because search engines often rely on computerized “bots” to crawl the Web and develop and maintain their indexes, many of the SEO concepts can be easily implemented by thinking strategically about the site’s content, title tags, meta tags, page structure, and accessibility coding. When the site has been “optimized” for search engines, the site’s URL can be submitted to search engines, which itself can help visitors find the site and improve the site’s ranking within the search engine results.

Depending on your (or your client’s) budget, you can do a range of things to increase both Web traffic and conversion rates. Traffic refers to the number of visitors to a site, while a conversion rate is the percentage of those Web visitors who actually complete a valid sale or other online transaction. If you have somewhat of a budget, spending money on pay-per-click advertising can be very useful and profitable.

Pay-per-click Internet advertising, or paid placement, is a method of site promotion whereby the advertiser (you) bids on the keywords or key phrases you think will be used by potential site visitors and then pays a fee anytime a visitor clicks an advertising link that leads back to the advertiser’s site. Google offers the perhaps the most wellknown pay-per-click service, Google AdWords, which displays your advertised URLs along the top or right edge in the Sponsored Links areas of the Google Search Results pages, like the example shown in Figure 3-1.

Additionally, if you are selling any products or services, conversion rates have been known to increase when a site does everything it can to easily facilitate a sale, such as having clearly labeled Add XXX Product to Cart buttons, making the checkout process easy to use, making clearly defined shipping and return policies available to visitors, and offering excellent customer service and sales support.

On the other hand, if you have no money set aside for marketing, it would be really smart for you to take a little time to make the site more search engine friendly. The more you know about SEO, the more valuable your services can be to your Web clients, whom often will want to rely on your knowledge and expertise to guide them through (or completely handle for them) the process of getting their site listed on search engines and attracting more visitors.

Practicing Ethical SEO Techniques

As with all things in life, there is a good way and a bad way to go about doing things, and when it comes to practicing Search Engine Optimization on your site, the same holds true. There is a good way to go about improving your search engine rankings, and then there’s a bad way.

Back when the Internet was new, when there weren’t so many Web sites and blogs, and search engines were something new, you could add a few different meta tags to your code and then sit back and watch as your site hit the number one or number two spot in the search engine rankings. Then, as more and more visitors began to rely on search engines that use Web robots and spiders to build their databases, a new breed of Internet scam artists was born.

These so-called SEO service providers had one aim: to make money by tweaking the HTML code on a site that would trick those search engine robots and spiders into showing certain Web sites at the top of the search engine rankings. The motivation to use this type of deception was that if your site was listed on the first or second page of search engine results, you’d get more site visitors, and therefore you’d sell more products and services. Of course, this hasn’t proven to be true, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying to cheat the system.

These sneaky tactics worked for a little while until the search engines devised a way to improve the Web robots and spiders to automatically detect and ignore sites that use common scams. As a matter of fact, some of these sneaky practices got so out of control that the search engines took even more drastic measures to ensure that their search results are as accurate and truthful as possible. As a consequence, it is no longer as simple as it once was to get good legitimate search engine rankings.

Because these questionable techniques fall into the realm of unethical practices, I don’t discuss them in detail in this article. However, to educate you further about what kinds of things to avoid, the following list briefly outlines some of the more common unethical practices you should take extreme care to stay away from:

Keyword padding: Do not engage in padding keywords into the meta tags or body content of Web pages that have nothing to do with the Web site’s specific business.

Keyword listing: Avoid listing keywords in the body of your site content when their purpose is not clear. The only legitimate place for a list of keywords is inside the keywords meta tag or when listing a site’s products and services. If you do list words in this capacity, do it carefully so that it doesn’t appear to be a spam-like keyword listing. A safer method would be to write copy that logically includes all the products and services in paragraph form.

Tag padding: Do not use multiple versions of the same tag within the HTML code, such as duplicate meta description or title tags, to try to get more information through to search engines than you can with one tag. This, too, will be viewed as spam by search engines and will put the URL at risk.

Image padding: Don’t use words in your alternative (alt) text attribute for images that have nothing to do with the image being described.

Hidden text: Don’t add keyword-stuffed text to a page where the font color matches the background color of the page or other container tag that holds the text. Search engines can detect such slimy practices and treat those pages, and possibly all pages at the offending Web address, as spam.

Oversubmitting: Never, ever submit a URL to any search engine, index, directory, or listing more than once in any 24-hour period. Daily submissions are also too often. Be realistic and submit only when significant changes have been made to the layout or content of a site. Besides, resubmitting your site is often unnecessary because, after your site has been indexed, the search engine periodically checks back on your site automatically.

Duplicate page submissions: Do not submit pages with identical content but with different filenames. This will be viewed as spam and can put the Web address at risk.

Cheating: Don’t trick people into visiting a site by using inaccurate keywords, meta tags, and content, or by false advertising or unethical page redirects. Do not try to outsmart the search engines. The people who write the search programs are always on the lookout for cheaters, and if they find unethical SEO techniques on a submitted URL, they have the power to prevent the entire site from being indexed.

Be forewarned that should you choose to attempt any of these practices on your own (or a client’s) Web site, you may be putting all the pages on that domain at risk of being indefinitely blacklisted by search engines. Besides, trying to trick the system is counterintuitive because most of the traffic coming to any Web site is often generated through search engines. Be smart and do the right thing. To be a good Web designer today, you must educate yourself about the ethical ways to make a Web site visible to search engines and avoid unethical practices altogether.