Search engine optimization is the method webmasters use to boost a particular site’s ranking within search engine indexes. A website’s search engine ranking is one of the most important factors controlling the traffic to that site. If a website is not able make it to the first page of search results, then it is unlikely to get visited much at all. This fact makes SEO one of the most important aspects of a websites planning and design. It is important to use professional tools and services, such as those provided by Interactive Web Solutions when designing site content.

The good news is that SEO practices make sense once they are understood. In the most basic terms, they are related to the keywords and links on an given page. A search engine, such as Google, periodically scans the entire web using programs called spiders. Spiders automatically “read” all of the content on a given page and identify common words or phrases on the page, including links. They will then assign that page a ranking based on the data. There are also other bits of meta data a spider collects such as age of the site and number of visitors. These can also affect ranking.

Keywords:

Keywords are simply words or short phrases that visitors might type into a search for a particular topic. For example, a visitor looking for a good information website about pet cats may type in cats, cat care, cat food, pet cat, and similar terms. Any or all of these keywords would be useful to include in a page about having a pet cat. Keywords should always be natural within the text. Not only is this a sign of good writing and quality content for readers, it will also prevent the site from being flagged as spam by search engine programs. Keywords work best when they are scattered throughout a page and included in headers and titles.

Links:

Links are the other primary item spiders will be hunting for a on a page. The spider will follow these links and determine the relevancy of each linked page to the original site. Pages that have many links to high-quality sites that relate to the same or similar topics will get a ranking boost. The opposite is also true. If the spider determines that a page is linking to irrelevant or low-ranking sites, then the links can actually hurt the page’s rating. It is important to know your links and be sure they are the best you can find.

Interactive Web Solutions understands the strategies for SEO and will help design websites that achieve top rankings on many search engine listings.