Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is a term that gets tossed around a lot these days in the online world. SEO encompasses a lot of different actions that can be taken with your website. Some of these we do in the course of building your website, others we work with you on and a few you need to do on your own.

Some Important SEO tactics

• Good, Clean Code
  • At Equine Online Design we make sure our websites are made with good solid code and up to W3C standards.
• Content is still KING
  • Since search engines can’t “see” a site but can “read” it, content takes precedence over “pretty” when considering search engine ranking. Have good quality word content, rich in keywords but human readable. Also, sites heavy in graphics or flash are frequently light on textual content and therefore can suffer in the SEO department.
• Write Content with Searchers in Mind
  • How do you find information on the Internet? If you are writing something that you want to be “found” on the Internet, think about the words and phrases someone would use to find your information. Use them more than once as you write, but not in every sentence.
• Content First
  • A search engine enters your site and, for the most part, ignores the styles, images and graphics. It just plows through the site gathering content and information. Few search engines scan more than the first third of the page before moving on. Make sure your website puts important content near the top.
• Keywords, Links, and Titles Meet Content
  • Search engines do not evaluate your site on how pretty it is, but they do evaluate the words and put them through a sifter, giving credit to certain words and combinations of words. Words found within your document are compared to words found within your links and titles. The more that match, the better your “score.”
• Content in Links and Images
  • Your site may not have much text, mostly photographs and links, but you have places in which to add textual content. Search engines look for alt and title in link and image tags. While these have a bigger purpose of making your site more accessible, having good descriptions and words in these attributes helps provide more content for search engines to digest.
• Link Popularity
  • It is not how good your site is, it is how good the sites are that link to you. This still holds weight with search engine favoritism. It’s about who links to you. Some suggestions to help you out in this endeavor:
    • Add your site’s url to your signature on forum posts on other sites.
    • Submit your site to directories (see below).
    • Advertise on other popular sites
• Good Navigation Links
  • A search engine crawls through your site, moving from page to page. Good navigation and links to the various pages on your site will invite a search engine to move gracefully from one page to another, following the connecting links and visiting most of your site.
• Meta Tags
  • Meta Tags contain information that describe your site’s purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. The meta tags are stored, unseen, within the head of your website files.
• Sitemaps
  • A sitemap or “site map” is a single page listing of all the pages on your website. It is intended for your visitors to get a good overview on what your site is about and to find a page of interest . It also has great benefits in search engines as it is always pointing to all your web pages.
• Google Sitemaps
  • Google accepts sitemaps of your site as part of their website submissions. Google needs to have this sitemap formatted in a special way using XML.

Bottom Line…

The goal is to have your website appear within the first few search engine pages for industry-related key words and phrases. Of the actions that can be taken to achieve this goal, some are a product of GOOD website construction while others are actions you or the web developer can take. These can be organic (free) or paid.

Organic

Organic optimizations are actions that can be done for your website that are free and usually don’t require any technical skills. By free, we mean that you aren’t paying for specific and direct online advertising methods per se. You will still need to invest your time and effort or pay your web developer to do this. And you may spend some advertising dollars in other, offline venues to drive traffic to your website.

Some examples of organic SEO include:

• driving traffic to your website by word of mouth
• emailing your contacts about your website
• finding the free business directories online and submitting your website address
• writing good website content with industry keywords
• writing online and offline articles
• mailing out flyers
• holding clinics
• putting up a business banner at an event you sponsor
• doing a vinyl wrap or magnetic door signs for your vehicle
• and more…the only limit is your imagination!

The list is endless really – it’s all a matter of finding creative ways to spread the word about your new website. As traffic increases on your website, as more online sites link to yours, as the content and quality of your website is focused on target audiences, the higher your page ranking becomes in the search engines for different keywords and phrases.

Paid

Paid SEO is a function of Marketing. These are things such as online advertisements and fee-based resource listings that host ads for your website. Examples include AdWords campaigns with Google and Facebook. It is also anything that is done to drive people/customers to your website using the online world as the resource.

In order for this type of SEO investment to pay off, it is important to monitor the effectiveness of anything done with some type of website data tracking statistics. This way you can determine what works, what doesn’t work and where to put your marketing dollars.