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Make your Web site click with algorithm search engines … and customers.
You may be under the impression that getting your Web site ranked on “spidering” or algorithm search engines such as Google involves the dark arts, or at least a secret handshake. If so, you can’t be blamed.
Some search-engine optimization (SEO) companies make it sound as if high rankings are more hocus-pocus than strategy—that the algorithms (part computer program/part math equation) that determine page rankings are designed to estimate something other than how relevant a site will be to an Internet searcher.
While there are a number of complicated and technical aspects of SEO—also known as organic optimization—most can be boiled down to a few simple, key principles:
• Your site should be informative and relevant.
• Your site should be easy to navigate.
• Your site should be easy to use.
Content Is King
No single element of your Web site is more important, when it comes to search-engine optimization, than content. Content is what the search engine actually is searching for.
Part of what search-engine algorithms determine is what is called keyword density, essentially the frequency with which a search term appears on a Web page. If a keyword appears too few times, it’s deemed less relevant; if it appears too many times, it’s deemed spam by the spider. Why is this? Conventional wisdom would suggest that the people designing these algorithms determined through research that copy relevant to a certain topic would reference that topic a certain number of times as a percentage of total copy.
There’s no hard and fast rule for keyword density; search engines do not make public their algorithms. A rule of thumb I’ve culled from something of an informal straw poll of the industry experts interviewed for this story is that the 5-percent to 10-percent range is a good ballpark figure.
“One of the mistakes that new SEO writers make,” says Heather Lloyd-Martin, president and CEO of SuccessWorks, a search-engine marketing firm in Bellingham, WA, “is to think that if putting a keyword in once is great, then 20 times is better.”
This leads to copy that reads as if written by a robot. The idea is for your copy to be the sort of information that would intrigue a customer, not a cyborg. Search-engine algorithms are designed to perform the seemingly impossible task of determining relevant copy without actually “reading” it.
You may be under the impression that getting your Web site ranked on “spidering” or algorithm search engines such as Google involves the dark arts, or at least a secret handshake. If so, you can’t be blamed.
Some search-engine optimization (SEO) companies make it sound as if high rankings are more hocus-pocus than strategy—that the algorithms (part computer program/part math equation) that determine page rankings are designed to estimate something other than how relevant a site will be to an Internet searcher.
While there are a number of complicated and technical aspects of SEO—also known as organic optimization—most can be boiled down to a few simple, key principles:
• Your site should be informative and relevant.
• Your site should be easy to navigate.
• Your site should be easy to use.
Content Is King
No single element of your Web site is more important, when it comes to search-engine optimization, than content. Content is what the search engine actually is searching for.
Part of what search-engine algorithms determine is what is called keyword density, essentially the frequency with which a search term appears on a Web page. If a keyword appears too few times, it’s deemed less relevant; if it appears too many times, it’s deemed spam by the spider. Why is this? Conventional wisdom would suggest that the people designing these algorithms determined through research that copy relevant to a certain topic would reference that topic a certain number of times as a percentage of total copy.
There’s no hard and fast rule for keyword density; search engines do not make public their algorithms. A rule of thumb I’ve culled from something of an informal straw poll of the industry experts interviewed for this story is that the 5-percent to 10-percent range is a good ballpark figure.
“One of the mistakes that new SEO writers make,” says Heather Lloyd-Martin, president and CEO of SuccessWorks, a search-engine marketing firm in Bellingham, WA, “is to think that if putting a keyword in once is great, then 20 times is better.”
This leads to copy that reads as if written by a robot. The idea is for your copy to be the sort of information that would intrigue a customer, not a cyborg. Search-engine algorithms are designed to perform the seemingly impossible task of determining relevant copy without actually “reading” it.
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