Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and volume of visitors to a web site from search engines. SEO concentrates on the "organic" or non-paid searches.
Good Coding
Search Engine Optimization starts with good coding. HTML written to web standards and content styling provided via a separate CSS file are the foundations of getting good search engine results. Having header tags in the code gives the search engines a good idea of what the main subjects of the content are. Alt tags on the images are better able to tell what the picture file is about. Clean, non-bloated code is easy to read by the search engines and easy to decipher.
Content is King
A search engine's job is to direct web surfers to the relevant pages they are looking to find. There are a large amount of web sites out there written to English-speaking audiences by someone not proficient in the language. There are a plethora of sites out there aiming to make money with advertisements, but they do not have relevant, readable content. Search engines do not want to have these junk sites as their top results. Good content is essential to having good SEO results. One basic rule is to provide content that people will want to read. If you follow this rule the search engines are more likely to direct traffic to you.
Avoid Flash Pages
Adobe Flash is a wonderful tool that has its place on the web (i.e. You Tube videos). Unfortunately, it is the only development program some pseudo-professionals know and entire web sites are put together with this tool. A Flash web site is almost entirely invisible to search engines which results in no search engine traffic. Along these lines, avoid having large amounts of the page written in Flash as any text or links are not read by search engines.
Note: Google announced in mid-2008 that they are starting to index some parts of SWF (Flash) files. They were not clear as to exactly what parts of the file could be read and what the results would be for Flash web sites. Since all the other search engines do not read Flash, we still recommend avoiding large amounts of Flash on a web site.
Domain Name
Search engines place a lot of weight on the domain name. Keywords in your domain name will give you a head start on SEO. For example, if your business is selling surfboards, a domain name of www.DelMarSurf.com will give you better results for searches with 'Del Mar' and 'surf'. Point Loma Technology's Google result is number one for 'Point Loma Web Design' and 'Point Loma Web'. We had this standing from almost day one due to our relevant domain name.
No Spamming
There was a time when all a web developer had to do in order to rank well was to have their keywords listed on the pages a hundred times or more. Today, all of the search engines are aware of this and will throw out any results that are clearly word spamming. Avoid using the same word over and over again if you want that word to rank.
Have more questions on search engine optimization? Give us a call at Point Loma Technology (619) 756-4540.
