Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - What exactly is it?

It's the ingredients

"I want my site to come up on the first page of a search"

I get that from every client, and every potential client. I can't blame them, we all want that. How do we accomplish this when we're competing against thousands of sites in the same category? It's the ingredients in the website itself.

SEO is the process of preparing your site to be search friendly. The whole process starts from the initial consultation with the client.

One half-
Proper coding techniques

Garbage in, Garbage out. Kind of a technology knundrum that if something is made from garbage, it will be garbage.

Our code vs our competitor's code

Below are 2 links to some web page code, one from from our competitor, which we actually grabbed off a live site, and one from us, which we rebuilt the same code. These two pages display the exact same content that a visitor would see. Compare the two and decide which is easier to read. Keep in mind, this is the code behind a web page and this is what the search engine sees.

Our Competitor's code Aero Web Design Code

As you can clearly see, our code is so much cleaner and easier for a search engine to read. Search engines love clean, human like code to read. Not a bunch of nonsense code that is truly unnecessary. Don't get stuck with a web site design from our competitors who use garbage coding techniques (I wouldn't even call it a technique). Not to mention they charge a $150 yearly service fee! For what?

The idea is to give search engines the ability to crawl your site with ease and rid the code of "search engine road blocks". CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a great contributor. CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content from document presentation. Meaning that the meat and potatoes of the page are what the search engine sees, and wants, Search bot character while the styling and positioning of elements are read from another page, the style sheet. Styles are what typically clutter up code and hinder a search engine from accessing the content of a web page. With styling and positioning out of the way, a search engine can read a page with ease. All of our sites use CSS

Another coding technique would involve the use of well thought out headings in the content. Search engines will put somewhat of an emphasis on headings.

Page titles, file names, alt tags for images, meta tags, and tableless layout all contribute to a site being search friendly. A lot of designers still layout pages with tables which will hinder searches. We use the correct method of layout via the "division/ separator" (div tag). These create invisible boxes for content and free up the page of unwanted code.

We all know that in just about everything in life, ingredients are what things are made of, and with quality ingredients, we get quality results in a web site design.

Google AdWords

AdWords are a pay-per-click service run by a few companies where you would pay for a click from someone searching certain keywords geared toward your business. We use Google as they are by far the number one search engine on the planet. These can be set up to show keywords in small or large geographical areas, or a variety of areas. You only pay as much as you can afford by using budgets.

This service flat out WORKS! We use this service for a few sites and couldn't be happier with the results. However, if the system is set up wrong, then you would be spending money for clicks that don't bring any business. We won't let that happen. We have experience with pay-per-click services.

* In my opinion this service would be considered marketing and not SEO. Some will agree with me and some will not.

Statistics

We can gather statistics from your website's performance. Things like traffic sources, geographic hits, visitor loyalty, new versus returning visitors, bounce rate, and which keywords are working for your site. These stats can point out weak areas that can be analyzed and improved.

Back Links

It is important for your site to get linked from other quality sites that relate to your sites content. One good strong link from a quality site can do wonders for your search placement. On the other hand, poor links can be detrimental. So getting links on irrelevant sites will do more harm than good.

The other half

Written content is the other half in my opinion.It will contributes to a site in so many ways, I am just going to mention here what it does for SEO.

Content gives a search engine something to read and along with our coding techniques, it gives a search engine easy access. If a search engine can read your pages, that's when your site will get indexed. That's what you want, and that's what we can do.

There's more...

There are 500 page books dedicated to SEO and some businesses do SEO as full time work. It can get very complex. However, to me, a lot of search techniques and procedures could be better labeled as Marketing and not SEO.

Animated sites- No No

There are a couple of other things that will slow up a search bot as well. Flash elements (animation) are notorious for impeding search engines primarily for the lack of actual text that can be read. This leaves total Flash sites virtually unsearchable! I must point out that there are improvements being made on this problematic topic as you read this, but are not perfected or very reliable at this point. This is a huge reason major company sites do not use much Flash if any at all, and it's not because they don't have the money!