Search engine optimization, or SEO as it is more commonly known, is all about increasing the ranking of your website in the search engines. Considering the fact that most people visit a website for the first time having searched in Google, it shouldn’t be hard to see why SEO is important.

Gaining visibility in the search engines is perhaps the single greatest (and most important) challenge of Internet marketing, but it is also one that you cannot afford to ignore. The following beginner’s guide will help you to get started in the extremely competitive world of search engine marketing.

Why Is SEO Important?

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the Internet every day, and its popularity is only growing. In countries like the US and the UK, almost one-hundred percent of Internet users use Google frequently. Google is not the only search engine of importance, however – Microsoft Bing is also growing in popularity in part due to the fact that it is the default, integrated search engine in Windows and on Windows Phone.

While there are also paid advertising options, around eighty percent of Google users ignore sponsored advertisements and instead only pay attention to the organic search results. These are the results where you want your website to appear as much as possible.

In around three quarters of search engine queries, users never look beyond the first page of the results unless they are particularly interested in finding more on a specific subject. More often than not, however, they will simply try searching for a different key phrase in order to narrow down their search.

With approximately twenty percent of search queries, people click on the first result in the list. This is also what happens when someone clicks the “I’m feeling lucky” button when using Google. By contrast, if your website is only in the tenth place, its click-through rate will only be around one percent on average. In conclusion, the higher your search engine ranking is, the better your click-through rate.

How SEO Works

Google, Bing and other search engines regularly send robots to crawl through the Internet and index new and updated content as well as check to see if old content is still there. These robots, also known as crawlers, are powered by complex search engine algorithms which are constantly getting better at weeding out poor quality content and rewarding decent content, just as human visitors would.

Considering the fact that there are literally hundreds of millions of websites out there with tens of billions of webpages between them, this task can only be done through automated software – there simply aren’t enough people on the planet to manually organize all of the content on the vast and constantly growing Web!

Search engine crawlers care about three key elements. Firstly, they want to determine whether or not content is relevant to the search engine terms that people are likely to use when looking for such content. Secondly, they need to be able to read and index the content. Crawlers have difficulty navigating certain code structures and they cannot read webpage elements programmed in Flash or Java.

Content which is protected by a password or a CAPTCHA is also invisible to the search engines as is any URL (webpage) which you add to the robots.txt file in the root directory of your website’s storage space. Thirdly, crawlers are very busy – they tend to focus more on scanning specific website elements such as Meta tags, headings, URLs, links (both internal and external), image tags and the bulk of the textual content on the page.

Optimizing Your Site’s Content

 In some ways, search engine optimization is actually easier than it used to be, since Web design and content designed primarily with your human readers in mind should also do well in the search engine results. Many Internet marketers used to do things the other way round – writing their content for the search engines by overusing key phrases and plastering links all over a website.

The search engines are constantly getting better at exposing such content and penalizing it as a result. Instead, they are far more likely to reward sites which offer useful, original content which also has impeccable spelling and grammar. By contrast, attempting to artificially manipulate your search engine ranking can and will end up being counterproductive, particularly since Google is getting better at noticing such attempts.

There are still some things that you need to do specifically to help your website look better to the search engines. Firstly, you should ensure that any pages on your site which you want the crawlers to index does not contain unreadable content. Avoid interfaces programmed in Java and Flash, since the crawlers cannot read such content.

These programming languages should only be used for Web-based apps and the like. Also, most mobile browsers do not support Flash at all. Other things to do include filling in your meta headlines and descriptions (these accompany the search results, so they should also be human-friendly). Diversify your key words and phrases and go easy with the internal and external linking.

Black Hat Tactics to Avoid

Some search engine marketers still seem to think that using black hat tactics can bring more traffic to a website. While some of them might work temporarily, they will come back to haunt you later on, and they can ultimately turn out to have a devastating effect on your traffic. After all, if you get de-indexed from Google, your website is all but done for. Following are some of the most common black hat tactics which you absolutely must avoid.

• Buying links: Google has always been against it, and it is getting better at catching people out. Buying links will inevitably get your links posted on irrelevant and low quality websites, ultimately leading to bad publicity.

• Keyword stuffing: If your content looks that it has been optimized for the search engines, then you have been using your chosen keywords too liberally. Keywords should be diverse and used naturally.

• Hidden text: Humans can’t see text which is the same colour as the background, but the search engines can, and they will penalize you for it. Hiding keywords can get you removed from Google entirely.

• Cloaking: This refers to showing a different page to the search engines from the one that you show to your human readers. Don’t do it.

• Spamming: This really should be obvious, but in spite of the fact that all consumers hate it, spam is still beloved by many unscrupulous Internet marketers. Don’t spam blogs, forums and social networks unless you want to infuriate and estrange your entire customer base.

David