If you have a business website, you want to attract as many customers

as possible. That’s a no-brainer. But sometimes actually accomplishing

this goal is anything but simple. With all the new rules and

regulations put out by the major search engines, getting your site in

front of internet users is often like navigating a very complex and

technical maze. So we’ve broken down search engine optimization (SEO)

into some manageable bites that so you can start with the basics.

Keywords

If you have run a keyword popularity report on Wordtracker.com looking

for popular Search Engine

Optimization terms and come up with a list of the most searched

words in your field, you know that you need to include these words in

your website in order to be found by the search engines. But where do

you put them and how?

SEO, in Denver and elsewhere,

used to be very simply a matter of placing keywords in prominent places

so when a search engine does its searching, your site is found easily.

Search engines operate with spiders, or web crawlers, that crawl

through websites and find those that have words most closely matching

the words in the search bar of the browser. Keywords in page titles,

page descriptions, and what web designers call META tags were the ones

that these spiders looked for most often.

Knowing this, web site designers began to include keywords at an

alarming rate in text. You might have seen an example of this when you

read an article that seemed to be incredibly redundant. The copywriter

was using keywords on a large scale to attract the attention of web

crawlers and therefore, get at the top of search results.

Today, this problem has been addressed by search engines like Google,

who are looking for websites that are the most user-friendly. And

user-friendly does not mean the same thing as keyword dense. So today,

the key to keyword placement is natural. Don’t overload your copy with

keywords, and don’t place keywords in your page titles or descriptions

nor in your META tags that have nothing to do with the content of that

particular page. You will not attract the latest form of web crawler.

Links

To achieve even more precise Search

Engine Optimization (SEO), Denver businesses online have been known

to join linking services or automatic link communities. The point of

these activities has been to up their ranking on search engines by

showing the web crawlers that they are linked to by dozens of other

websites. The problem with this is similar to the keyword trend

described above.

When search engines rank their results today, they look at a number of

factors. They match keywords, yes, but they also look at the usability

of the site by analyzing the sites that link to it. So if you sell

patio furniture and you have links to your site from pool companies and

gardening websites, this is a good sign that your site offers quality

information recommended by other professionals.

If however, you have joined a linking service that simply sets up

reciprocal links between you and random others, such as a dog groomer,

the search engine’s spider will recognize this as simply a ploy to get

better search results and not an indication of the usefulness of your

site. So stick to legitimate links that actually provide a benefit to

your customers.