Search Engine Optimization…. Ok now what?
Let’s break it down. You want people to find your website. So when most people look for something they go to so Search Engine. (Like google)
The search engine has looked at a LOT of pages and has come up with a score or ranking for words for all those pages.
You type in a set of words… and the search engine will come up with a list of sites or pages that are probably closest to what you’re looking for.
How do the search engines connect the dots of pages to searches?
When the search engine “crawl” bots scan a website, they will look at al the different parts of a website and assign value to parts of the page (we will elaborate on this later). The crawl bots also make note of internal and outbound links. The internal links help it figure out what content is grouped with what and how the site is structured. The external links lead it to other websites.
Way back in the old days of the internet the crawl bots would just wonder around the internet bouncing from outbound link to outbound link just scanning pages and coming up with keyword scores.
Things got more organized but that’s still mostly how it’s done.
How does my page get ranked on words?
Every part of your website is words. That’s how the robots build your page…. The request comes back with code that is converted to spacing and sizes and color. So each section of the page with content for the user can be judged on what words are there. Each chunk of page or section gets assigned a value.
With each score assigned to single words or groups of words, the system can build a decent snapshot of what your page is about. This is where we try and make adjustments so the page content is better tuned for a specific keyword or set of words.
Images have alt or description tags to assist with the visually impaired. Other meta-tags help with the flow of your site and structure to group like pages. This helps with the end-user-experience. All of this is scanned and built into the score of your page and overall website.