Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process by which a website is evaluated and improved in order to increase its page ranking on search engines and ultimately drive traffic to the site. Let’s break it down: search engines, such as Google, need some method for organizing their search results. Google (which we will focus on for now because they have the greatest market share) has a complex algorithm that determines the page’s rank. The content of a website is the primary factor evaluated. Google looks for the term being searched, synonyms for that term, the proximity of the synonyms, etc. Links to the site from other external pages also factor in. The ranking of those external pages factors in the rank of the pages they link to and so on, and so forth: forming a web, rather appropriately.
So how do you get in that web? If you have a website, chances are you’re already there. Google ‘crawls’ the web through the use of automated programs that create an index of existing websites. The goal is to improve your page ranking, and the best way to do that is to improve your content. But you want to do this anyway – because a great website focuses on the people who use it, and it’s them you should be improving the content for, ultimately.
Say you’re running a bakery and you want more people to find your business through your website. You had some wide-eyed college student build your website, and he or she missed a few critical components, like the page title. The page title is the text at the top of the browser window – but it’s also used by search engines as an indication of what’s on that page – so the last thing you want is for it to be left blank. So let’s change that – to Dana’s Delicious Danish, because alliteration is cool. This lets a search engine know that your name is Dana, you probably sell Danish, and that they taste good – right? Well, maybe… but Danish is also an adjective describing folks from Denmark – so it could be confusing. A better page title would be Dana’s Delicious Danish – a Chapel Hill, NC Bakery! Not terribly exciting, but it’s descriptive.
The next step is to verify that the page’s content reinforces the title. For example, we would not want to tell Google that we’re running a bakery and spend the entire page talking about mixed-martial-art wrestling. Instead, we should mention things like bakery, pastries, perhaps a croissant or two, that we’re located in Chapel Hill, and that our foodstuffs are tasty, scrumptious and filling. By doing so, we’ve reinforced the page title with rich content. With any luck, all this work will improve our page ranking. However it’s also important to consider that while there are some absolute measurements of a website’s quality, it will also be judged relative to other similar websites. So for example, if Phil’s Phyllo Factory has great content and colorful photographs and detailed recipes and a bunch of twitter followers, chances are he’ll get a better page ranking for the search ‘Chapel Hill Bakery’. Those are the breaks.
Rather than get into a pastry arms race, the best focus for any website owner is to improve the experience for the user. Google has some great tools to help us evaluate that sort of thing. The primary tool for tracking data about website users is called Google Analytics. Analytics is a program that you ‘plug in’ to your website. It tracks the number of visitors to your website, where they’re from, how long they spend on each page – these are just a few of the statistics. It’s a wealth of information you can use to make better decisions on which pages of your site to improve, or which to remove entirely.
It's important to remember that SEO is a process - not something that can be done overnight. Even if you make great changes to your content, it make take days or weeks for those changes to bear fruit. But when you've improved your website's content and your page rank, you can take comfort in knowing that your efforts can't disappear overnight, either.
