SEO Tips - Five Steps to Optimization

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Five Steps to Optimization

As you all probably know, search engines use formulas called ranking algorhythms to determine the order of their results. Keeping up with these algothythms is impossible, but it is possible to stay on top of the components that search engines care about in a general way. If you have limited time or limited budget for doing search engine optimization, consistently staying on top of these components will serve you well, even if you don't do anything else.

What would you guess would be included in the five most important factors to catch and keep search engine ranking? Here's a list — and some of it may surprise you!

1. HTML page title
2. Visible HTML text on the page
3. Inbound links (considering both quantity and quality)
4. Anchor text
5. Age of domain

That's it. Five fairly simple ways to make the webcrawlers give more weight to your pages.

You'll notice that we're talking about pages here, not a site. That's an important distinction. Don't forget that each page of the website is analyzed individually by the search engines. That's a lot of opportunities to be noticed, but it also means that you need to optimize every page, not just your home page. Remember that visitors to your site often follow deep links to get there, landing on a particular page — rather than on your home page, the page on which you have, no doubt, lavished the most attention. Some visitors may never even see your home page! So, from a usability point of view, make sure that every page has a call to action, a point, something that you want the visitor to do and easy access to doing it.

The five factors will ensure that even companies without a specific search program can gain visibility with the search engines. For even more visibility, you may wish to consider an entire organic and/or paid search campaign; ask your customer support manager for more information on how we can help.

And in the meantime, if you want some reading to take to the beach this summer, we recommend John Battelle's new book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. It's well-written enough to be beach material but gives an excellent background on the past, present, and future of search technology.