Search Engine Optimization

We've talked about many different ways to improve a small business web site that will provide your business with measurable returns. We've talked about content, design issues, technical issues, and more. If all that sounds like a lot of work, never fear! Any number of companies stand willing and ready to "guarantee" you a top 10 or even a #1 ranking for your web site on Google, Bing, and other search engines, for a mere $99-$900 a month, plus setup fees.

What these companies are promising is a service called "search engine optimization" or "SEO." By tweaking your web site, these companies say, you will rank higher on the results for popular search engines.

Needless to say, there's a large gap between what they call SEO and what the rest of the world calls SEO. SEO of any sort aims to increase the traffic flowing to your site via the "organic" results of a search engine. That is to say, to get higher-profile search results without paying for placement.

Where the difference comes in is in execution. Some vendors will merely pack the your web site with hidden HTML tags. A class of tags called "meta" tags only can be used in the header of a web page, so they never appear to the user. The most popular of these for SEO continues to be one called the keywords tag. Unfortunately, even if the keywords included are perfectly chosen, it is pretty much wasted effort. This practice of packing huge numbers of possible search terms into the keywords tag persists although it has almost no use. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others caught on long ago and almost entirely ignore the keywords tags.

That's not to say every meta tag or hidden tag is useless. The meta description and meta page name tags can help you, not by increasing your ranking necessarily, but by affecting the result displayed to the user. For example, the "snippet" that Google displays includes the page name and sometimes the description.

There is a much more effective method of optimizing a web page for search engine results. In fact, sites like Google are happy to provide advice on this topic. Their biggest piece of advice is: make sure your keywords are in the text the user sees. That is the text that Google searches, indexes, and ranks.

Next time, we'll talk more about choosing good keywords, how and where to use them, and why placement is important. Our newsletter comes out the third Tuesday of every month. We'll see you on October 19th.