What is all that buzz about Search Engine Optimization? Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of making your website score good in search engines, thus generating a higher traffic.

Why do I need to know about this SEO? If you own a website, for whatever possible purpose, your goal is always to reach as many people as possible. Whether you are interested in doing the necessary SEO yourself or you’ll be hiring professionals to do the job for you, you should read up at least a little about what SEO is and how it is done. After all, you’ll want to know exactly what to do, or what you’ll be paying for.

Now what does this SEO consist of?

How do search engines get their list of websites? And more important, how do I get my website on that list?

Allow me to elaborate on how a search engine works. Search engines have these programs called web crawlers, which do nothing more than surf from one site to another. When a crawler comes on a page, it scans the entire content of that page and stores it in the search engine’s database. After that, it takes a look at all the links on the page, and then visits those links. On that new page, it again scans and stores the content, and then follows the new links.

But… My new website isn’t linked anywhere, then how on earth will I get indexed? Fortunately, you can manually submit your website to be scanned by the crawlers. Go to the website of a search engine and find out how to submit your website there. Here’s the submission page for Google and Yahoo! to get you started.

Technically optimizing your website is not “the magic answer”. Before you start your SEO, you have to put thought into the content that is (going to be) on your website. But what is good content?

• Write your own text. Search engines keep track of content on similar websites and if they find out that you content is the same as on another website, they might not index it.
• Use your keywords! You may have noticed me using the words ‘search engine’, ‘optimization’ and ‘SEO’ a lot. When scanning a page, search engines try to examine what topic the page is about. It speaks for itself that words that occur multiple times will very likely be picked up as being the content’s subject. Words in titles are ranked higher than words in plain text.
• Update your website as much as possible. If search engines notice that your website always remains the same, its crawler will not honor you its visit as often as a constantly changing website.
• Use images only as a decorative or illustrative item. Images should never be used as content. The possibilities to present your content in a special way are unlimited with images, but the content in an image will never be indexed. If you really have to use an image, use the alt-attribute <img src=”image.jpg” alt=”descriptive text” /> to describe what’s on the image. Not only does this give the search engine an idea of what there is on the image, it also gives visually impaired users an idea what they’re missing.

Metatags are pieces of information that are only visible for search engines. Along the years however, metatags have lost some of their original meaning. They were supposed to provide some guidance to search engines on what your website is about. Unfortunately, people abused metatags to score good on certain keywords even though their content isn’t that relevant or interesting regarding that keyword.

Despite the fact they lost some meaning, they still are part of how search engines index websites, and thus part of your SEO-strategy. Your website title, metatag descript and metatag keywords should be relevant to the exact page they’re on. Writing metatags once and using them throughout the entire website will not give the search engine an extra indication of what the exact pages are about. Parts of the metatags can be reused however, provided they are relevant to the page’s content.

Web crawlers are mini-browsers, which are less advanced then their big brothers Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox etc. Real browsers try to build the entire page as good as possible, even though errors in the HTML-code are found. Web crawlers are not always able to display an entire website if a serious error occurs halfway your page. This may have the unpleasant result that not all of your content is indexed because the crawler could only read half of your page.

A couple of years ago, the holy grail in web design were tables. They provided a very easy way to correctly position your design. However, tables are meant for data, and data only, and this was forced by search engines. Search engines don’t like tables. Your design and the position of every piece of content should be accomplished using divs. A pleasant side-effect is that most often there will be less HTML-code needed for the same result, which makes your website faster, and lowers the bandwith on your web server.

We just learned that crawlers are mini-browsers that do not have the same capabilities as real web browsers. Crawlers do not support javascript. If you do rely on javascript, you should try to find a way to make sure that the content that will be missed without javascript, will somehow, somewhere be shown.

Try to make your URL’s readable to the human eye, try to make your URL’s comprehendible. Search engines also use the URL of your page to determine what your website is about. Having a webpage with an URL like “www.somepage.com/page/42/p/art_4339.html” will not help the search engine figure out what this page is about. “www.somepage.com/buy_cheap_bananas.html” will help them know what your website is about so that they know when to show your website in their search results.

Finally, pagerank, isn’t that what I’m always hearing about? Let us make clear what pagerank really is about.

Up to here, we’ve constantly been trying to make sure that your website can be found when searching on the correct keywords. Not only do you have to be listed for those keywords, you also want to be on top of the list! Search engines try to list the most relevant results first, but how do they determine what content is the more relevant?

Part of the answer is all of the points above. By making sure you use your keywords a lot, you try to use them in your URLs etc, search engines will rate you on how good you match on what is being searched for. Now for the other part, there’s pagerank. Pagerank is an algorithm by Google to determine how important a website is.

Google gives web pages a score, your PageRank, which is only known to Google. A representational value of that score, on a scale from 0 to 10 with 10 being the best possible result, can however be checked. This score is being calculated by how much other websites link to your page. Not only does quantity matter, the quality of the incoming links also matters: links from web pages who themselves have a higher pagerank will weigh more than links originating from a low pagerank.

So, you are given a number, but what does it do? Well, when listing the most relevant results for a search, the pagerank comes into play so Google can determine ‘which website is most likely to contain interesting information’. A reputable website, linked to by hundreds of other websites, will obviously score higher than an unknown website which may also contain relevant content.

Please be aware that in the first couple of months your website gets indexed, no representational PageRank can be calculated. You can start building your backlinks already, but you will have to be patient to see the effect. Building backlinks should be done the proper way: your presence on the web = your website’s presence on the web. If you are active on the web, be sure to leave a link back to your website! Link farms (a group of websites that all link to one another) are strongly discouraged. It’s ok to have some websites to link back and forth with, but you do not want to participate in a large link exchange.

Some companies offering SEO services may promise incredible results. They might be able to live up to them, but they often use dirty tricks (such as link farms) to get their results. Search engines don’t like these dirty tricks, because they interfere with the goal of search engines, which is to try to list the most relevant results. When those dirty tricks are discovered, you may be severely penalized with a drastic drop in the search results, or you could even get banned.

The only way to get long-term results from your SEO is to follow the guidelines imposed by search engines.