Elements of Search Engine Optimization

Prashant Deorah

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of maximizing your website's ranking on search engines for a strategically defined set of keywords and key phrases

SEO is an important element of your online marketing strategy because it helps your potential customers find your website easily and quickly when they use Web search engines. In fact, a majority of users find information on products, services and companies through search engines.

Last month, we gave you a brief introduction of search engine optimization. In this article, we will take a look at the various elements that you need to keep in mind while optimizing your site for search engines.

Keywords are the key: Users search for information through search engines by typing keywords into search engines. Search engines use algorithms to show users sites that are most relevant to those keywords.

So, sites must be sensitive to two key elements: 1) What keywords are users most likely to use to search for information that is provided by our site? 2) And how do we ensure that search engines consider our site relevant to those keywords?

To answer the first, you will have to use intuition and research. Brainstorm with your marketing team to arrive at keywords that uniquely define your site's offerings and are most likely to be used by searchers. For instance, a travel company may target overseas travel as a keyword whereas users are actually searching for holidays abroad.

Search engine optimizers analyse search engine referral logs and use online tools such as Wordtracker and Google Keyword Selector to refine the keywords to be targeted.

Deploying the keywords: Once you have shortlisted the keywords, it's time to deploy them on the site. Identify target pages for each or pairs of keywords. Make sure that the page has good user-friendly and original content around the keywords. Ensure that your keywords are incorporated into all prominent and strategic places such as the Title tag (the text that appears on the bar at the top of your browser), page heading, sub-heads and in the actual copy. The idea is to make sure that search engines understand that your page is relevant to the keywords you have targeted.

Site navigation and structure: Search engines build their gigantic indexes of pages by sending out software programs (referred to variously as bots, spiders or crawlers), which trawl the web through hyperlinks. As a result a lot of relevant pages on your site that may be easily reached by a human user may never be reached by a search engine bot. Though search engines are evolving all the time, some of the known stumbling blocks for bots are dynamically generated pages (or those that are generated only after user input), pages using frames and pages that require cookies or session IDs.

To figure on search engines, therefore, you must ensure that all your pages are easily reachable through plain hyperlinks. An option for dynamically generated pages is to precook the result pages and provide hyperlinks to those pages so that even search engines can access them. Second, structure your pages in such a manner that your important, content-rich pages are higher in the hierarchy.

Build in-bound links to your site: Building link popularity is one of the most important aspects of your search engine optimization efforts. Link Popularity, in its simplest form, is the measure of the quality and quantity of external pages that provide a link to your website.

In the early days, search engines ranked a page merely by how relevant its content and Meta tags were for the keywords that were searched. It was easy to manipulate rankings on such a system by using spam keywords and key phrases that had no relevance to the site's content.

To counter this, search engines started using link popularity to determine how a page or site should be ranked for combinations of keywords.

Search engines evaluate, among other things:

• How many sites link to yours
• The quality of these sites (for instance, your site will have a better link popularity rating if you get a link from quality sources rather than unknown sources)
• The relevance of the linking site to your site's content (if you are an airline site, for instance, it will be better if you get links from travel sites rather than biochemistry ones)

Each link acts as a vote by the linking site in favour of your site. Each link enhances your 'reputation', 'rank' and 'credibility' among search engines.

Of course, many sites and SEO companies have tried to build link popularity by unethical methods like using 'link farms' (sites that exist purely to provide links with no context or relevance). These are just temporary measures and may ultimately hurt the credibility and visibility of your web site.

The best way to build linkages is to have content that other sites may think valuable enough to link to or build reciprocal links with sites that have contextually-similar content. Another way is to submit your site to general-purpose and niche directories.

In summary, good content that incorporates the keywords you have shortlisted through your research and brainstorming, good site navigation and structure and a steady build-up of inbound links will ensure that search engines see your site in good light.

(The author is the CEO of Puretech Internet Pvt. Ltd.)