SEO

I am living and breathing SEO of late. I'm all for organic search for it remains one of the best and most inexpensive ways of marketing your information/business on the web. Once you understand how the spiders weave their way through your site and you design your site and content accordingly, your site will climb it's way to the top of the SERPs.

Optimizing your content for high rankings in a search is very much like conducting a search yourself. You use specific key terms and phrases as well as their synonyms to narrow your search to the most targeted and useful results. Likewise, when selecting keywords and phrases to include in your titles, tags, headlines and content you select terms that are specific to your industry and topic, using contextually common terms while avoiding “lingo”.

The crawler interprets meta tags and content in much the same way we read but it is not yet capable of conceptual interpretation. It is sensitive to keyword stuffing yet a natural flow or repetition of keywords throughout a page or article is not only acceptable but desired. Any given word or phrase however should not exceed over 2% of your content for the sake of Google algorithms. The crawler places particular emphasis on a keyword enriched title which appears as the first 64 characters in a search results placement of your URL.

The meta description also appears in the search results which enhances the opportunity for a click-through to your editorial content. A keyword rich meta description will not only increase the likelihood of click on your content but increases the ranking of your content for two of the major engines – Yahoo and MSN.

Also, crawlers read html and are incapable of reading content that appears as a gif, jpg or java file. This problem of unoptimizable content is overcome with the use of the alt tag which allows you, the editor, to provide a keyword rich text description of an image or script.