What language does SEO speak?

In the grand scheme of SEO significance; if content is king and quality links are queen to attract search engines; then HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the next in line to the throne.  Search engines “speak” HTML language when they “crawl” your pages to read the HTML language written into your programming code.  Many website designers either don’t choose to build the keywords and key phrases (called META description and META content) into websites, for whatever reason.  Since we’re talking about your website, however, for the sake of your business’ expansion, your HTML pages should always contain META keywords into the META fields.  Recently, META keywords tags are not as significant to search engine crawlers as they used to be due to early on when search optimization specialists learned the tricks of SEO, they would often try to stuff the META keywords tag with keywords into every page and attempt to gain an unfair advantage (called Black Hat SEO).  For this reason, search engines like Google reduced the impact they have on indexing.  However, the META description tag is still important because the text of it will show up in the search engine results page (SERP).

SEO Checkup

Right Click on any page of your website and select 'View Source'.

Check for:

<title></title>  (it exists, not blank & title of page)

<meta name="description" content="" />  (it exists, not blank & relevant to page)

<meta name="keywords" content="" />  (it exists, not blank & relevant to page)

<img> should have alt="" included  (it exists, not blank & relevant to image)

If you’ve had a website or read about websites for any period of time, you’ve heard the acronym, SEO.  So, what’s the buzz about SEO? 

1.       What is it?  Search engine optimization is, by definition - the practice of designing web pages so that they rank as high as possible in search results from search engines.   But there’s so much more to it than just designing web pages to keep your website ranking well in the major search engines, it's about integrating it seamlessly into your page design without your visitors even being aware it’s there.  SEO is an on-going task that usually requires the time and talent of an experienced webmaster in order to keep acceptable positioning within search engines as well as reach your audience.  A common and costly mistake made is to spend the time and energy enhancing their site up front (or infrequently) and hope they can maintain a ranking.  It may hold true for a few vague key words, but there is so much information flowing around the internet that there will always be other sites upgrading and changing to ensure they are enhancing their rankings.  Think of it in these terms - just as you would continue to maintain a brick and mortar presence, cleaning up and maintaining your image; so you must maintain your web presence in order to draw visitors to your site. 

2.       Why is it important?  SEO is important because of statistics – facts are solid.  According to Nielsen Net View, during the month of Dec 2009, the American population utilized the top 10 search engines approximately 1.0 billion times to access information.  Search engines are the #1 starting point where people go to look for businesses whether it’s to search for:

§  Local business

§  Confirm your business’ validity/reliability

§  To see what others are saying about your business

§  Price comparison

If you want to grow your business, realize your audience has visited you from their PC’s before they’ve darkened your door.  If you don’t have a website, you may be missing a huge chunk of that audience.  SEO is a great method to get you noticed.  It takes some work, but it’s well worth it.  But where do you start, you ask?  To be continued...check back next month, same JEMI-time, same JEMI-newsletter.  (I know! I’m not right, right?)