If you are unfamiliar with the process by which search engines rank and order the listings that appear when someone searches for information, you need to understand a few basic concepts.  The search engines all use a variety of different methods to analyze individual websites.  Based upon their analysis, those engines then give each website a relatively arbitrary ranking.  The higher a page’s rank, the higher up in the listings that website will appear.  

 

How exactly do these search engines create their rankings?  Different factors come into play.  If you are interested in making sure that your website ranks highly when people are searching for products you sell or services you offer, you need to know at least these basics about search engine optimization. 

 

Many different factors come into play when trying to enhance your website’s rankings in the search engines.  The most basic of these factors has to do with the HTML code behind the website.  The specific words that were inserted into the code have a specific effect on the ranking of your website in the eyes of the search engines.

 

If you paid someone to create your website, you probably have never really examined the code that, truly speaking, is what makes your website tick.  Luckily, I’m here to provide you with some beginner tools you can use to, at the very least, sound intelligent when you speak with your web designer to make sure that everything is being done to optimize your website for the search engines. 

 

First, open your web browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, etc.).  Load your website by typing in its address.  When your page loads, you’ll want to look at the code behind the page.   In the latest version of IE, you’ll find the code by clicking on the Page button on the right hand side of the page and then scrolling down to “View Source.”  When you click on this menu item, another window will open that, to the uninitiated, will look like a bunch of gobbledygook.  In Firefox, simply look under the View menu.  Netscape has something similar.  You’re looking for the menu item that refers to “source” or “code.” 

 

Don’t worry about all that code.  We won’t go into a lot of detail.  And, thankfully, most of the code you’ll be looking for is at the top of the webpage.  Starting at the top, look for:  meta Name="description" Content=” 

After the word content should be a sentence or two that accurately describes your business or your product.  Below that description should be:  meta Name="Keywords" Content=   with a list of keywords separated by commas.  These keywords need to be carefully chosen to represent terms people might use to search for your product or service. 

 

One last thing to check and you’ll have a very basic understanding of how a website can be optimized for a search engine.  When you have your browser open, what is the title of that webpage?  It should be something that contains a couple of keywords, again, terms people might use when searching for your product or service. 

 

To sum up, three basic elements make up your first line of search engine optimization:  strong meta Name description content, strong meta Name keywords, and well written page titles.  Any good optimization will begin with these three steps. 

 

Once you realize the importance of keywords and meta tags, you probably figured out that many of the major search engines rely much less heavily on keywords (they’ve been overused by spammers!) and look more closely at your website content. 

 

“What?” you say.  “I just spent all that time researching keywords and injecting them throughout my website!”  Well, good.  You need to take that first step in order to be able to continue further down the SEO path.  Yes, Google, MSN, and Yahoo nearly ignore (yes, ignore!) the meta keywords, they don’t ignore the content in your web pages.  And that content needs to be chock full of keywords.

 

Try this little bit of SEO research.  Put yourself in the mind of one of your potential customers.  Open your search engine of choice (you should probably be choosing one of the biggies because your customers most likely are) and search for your company using some carefully chosen keywords.  Don’t use your website address.  While searching for your exact website does provide some important information, that isn’t the focus of this little experiment. 

 

Look carefully at the listings that come up.  Who is ranked first?  What is in the description next to the website?  What keywords keep showing up again and again in your competition’s listings?  Now, click on a couple of the top rankings.  Look at how their website is designed.  Do several keywords jump out at you immediately?  They should.  Take note of these keywords and their placement.  Look at the code behind their websites (with different browsers this happens differently- usually it’s under a menu called view source or view page info).  Inspect their meta tags and descriptive keywords. 

 

Your head should be buzzing right now with ideas for ways to improve your website.  Remember, search engine optimization is a step by step process.  Like many things, it is never done.  Right when you think everything is looking great, you’ll learn about yet another way to enhance your website’s ranking.  Keep moving forward- a step at a time.  Before you know it, you’ll see your website in Google’s top ten!