DondrArt blogger Advice!

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process where we add meta tag data to web pages so they can be spidered by search engines and found by people searching for keyword-related content.

This article will explore some of the finer details of SEO that will help you to prepare your web pages for submission to search engines.

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.

The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer or spider, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Depending on the keyword density of a page, and the algorithms used by specific search engines, each web page will be entered into the search engine for retrieval. When someone searches for any of the keywords included, the web page would be retrieved to display in the results. The higher the web page displays in the results, the more chance there is of the searcher visiting that web page.

Some people use SEO experts to carry out the optimization process for their web site. Usually these are corporations, and the costs can be expensive. But the results are worthwhile when you can attract thousands of new prospects to your web site in a relatively short time.

If you decide to optimize your web pages yourself, the most important thing to know is WHO your target audience is, and aim your content and keywords at that audience.

It's important to choose the right keywords for your meta-data, which is located in the head section of your web page HTML code. Using keyword search tools can be helpful, like goodkeywords.com. They will help you to find good keyword terms and phrases that you can use to attract the right audience to your web site.

As a rule of thumb, when writing the content for your web site, or when sourcing it from external places, for each 400-500 words, insert roughly 2-3 keywords/phrases per page for optimal keyword density.

The title meta-tag is the most important of all, and should compel readers to click on your site in the search engine results.

Try not to exceed 200 characters when writing the description meta-tag. Include one or two sentences with the keywords that the web page targets.

Again, it's important to keep your target market in mind for the keywords you choose, but if they aren’t the words that your customer will search for, what’s the point?

For the three SEO rules you must know about to successfully optimize your web site for search engines.