S.E.O. Services
SEO is the practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEOs consider themselves to be in the broad field of web site optimization.
The Majority of web traffic is driven by major commercial search engines like Yahoo! and Google, the two biggest. Together comprising 67 percent of all searches in 2005 according to ComScore Media Metrix. If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to web sites provided via search. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.
Search engines are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web better and return increasingly relevant results to users. However, there is and will always be a limit to how search engines can operate. The right moves can bring you thousands of visitors and attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. The online environment is becoming increasingly competitive, and those individuals who perform SEO will have decided advantage in visitors and customers.
Okay lets do this! Search engines crawl the web with automated programs called bots or spiders that access and index the hyperlink structure comprising the world wide web. The advantage of this is that these bots or spiders store this discovered structure into a database so that when a search is performed, billions of documents can be run through in a matter of seconds, even less! to pull up the information you’ve requested.
So how do you, the one behind the wheel drive your site to your customer?
What should I avoid?
burying pages more than three clicks away from the home page, spiders may not crawl that deeply into your site.
Pages requiring a session ID or Cookie to enable navigation, spiders may not be able to retain these elements.
Pages that are split into frames can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.
Links contained within a SWF file cannot be indexed by search engine bots or spiders.
Pages that re-direct before showing content. Search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic.
The key to ensuring that a site’s contents are fully accessible is to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. This is where a site map is best utilized. Lets say you do want a flash header or flash navigation within your site, the search engine cannot read into a SWF file so a quick tip here is to insure your site map is up to date and placed where the spiders and bots can directly access it. Another tactic you will often see on a web site is having all links present in the footer on every page thus reducing the three click rule, and making all pages accessible through only one click or two clicks. There are so many different aspects of SEO that if I wrote them all down here, I might as well publish a book on the subject. This initial understanding of how to work with search engines will get you off to a strong start in your web development. Use these strategies and watch your web site traffic increase.
One last thing to keep in mind is that once you do make your site, and all your content is in place, your products are featured and your promoting it…the job is not done, the site must always be active, things must always be updated, changed, rearranged, in essence kept alive the rule here is movement creates interest where as “at a stand still” is boring.