In this blog I will briefly describe the concept of Search Engine Optimization, and how this can help a website to be noticed.
Optimizing a website to be found by search engines is one of the most important things that can be done for a website. These days when someone wants to find something on the Internet most of the time they will use a search engine such as Google, or Yahoo. From there, they will type in several key words that describe what they are looking for. If your website isn’t one of the sites that comes up on the first page of the search most of the time you are out of luck, because most people don’t go past the first page or two of search results.
There are a couple of things that can be done to help your site be found. If you have some money, you can pay to be a “sponsored link”, or pay per click (PPC) link. For instance if you search basketball shoes in Google the first few links that come up are sponsored links meaning that those websites will pay money to Google whenever they are clicked on. The downside to these sponsored links is that people are becoming more and more Internet savvy, some people skip past the sponsored links looking for the more “organic search results“.
The alternative to paying for sponsored links is of course being that organic search result, meaning that you truly have the best relevance according to what the search parameters are. This method is cheaper monetarily, but much more time consuming, it can be a full time job to keep a website near the top of a search list. This method involves understanding how search engines work and modifying the content and HTML code of your website so that your website will come up near the top of a search. This process involves a lot of work, from thinking of all the possible keywords that your website might be under, all the way to knowing where to put those words in the code and content of your site. But, if your site is one of the top organic search results all the work will be worth it.
In doing all of this, you must be careful not to stuff your site with “keywords” (keyword stuffing) that may not be relevant to the topic of your website, or spamdexing. Search engines put a lot of effort into finding sites that abuse the system in this way, and will remove them from all searches. If you aren’t in the search engine at all, you will never be found, so don’t cheat!
