Our world today is filled with tons of tech style acronyms—SEO is just one of many. SEO is “search engine optimization” and can be divided into two basic categories, organic and external. This article will give a brief description of SEO and how it may impact your website.
SEO Definition
SEO or search engine optimization is all about increasing your rankings with search engines. The theory is if you are selling blue widgets, you want to be near the top of the list of results when a customer types ‘blue widgets’ into a search engine query. Different search engines have different ‘algorithms’ for ranking their search results. In 2010, Goggle is pretty much the top dog of search engines, so much of SEO this year is based on getting higher rankings in Google searches. 
Google Rankings
First lets talk basics about Google searches. Rankings of a google search result are determined by a complex list of variables, and those variables are constantly evolving as Google gets better and better at delivering what you are looking for. So, let’s look in very broad terms at how Google appears to be ranking search results.
Google Search Results
As of 2010, Google seems, in very broad terms, to be determining ranking based on three large categories (much of this is guess work as well as based on what Google tells us it is doing).
- Individual profiles
- Organic source material
- External, valid, one-way links
Individual Profiles
Over the past few years Google has begun offering a variety of free services to both businesses and individuals. For individuals they offer a free email service called gmail. They also have googlevoice, google docs, google apps and more recently a dedicated browser called Chrome. They have also expanded into the mobile phone world with Android. From all of these sources Google is watching what we type, what we search for, what we talk about, and what we do. They take all this info to build a profile of our interests, age, location, and spending habits. When you do a search at google, they know a lot about you and tailor the search results toward your interests. If you use any of these services, try logging into your gmail in one tab of a browser and then doing a search for any topic that you have a hobby interest in. For example, if you are a fan of the baseball team the Angels, when you type in just the word “angels,” you’ll get baseball results. Try having a friend next to you log in on their computer. Let’s say this friend also has a gmail account, but is not a baseball fan and has no interest in baseball, but in contrast, this friend is a Christian minister who often does research online about “angels.” The Google search results your friend gets when typing in “angels” should bring up articles about heavenly angels and not about baseball. Personal profiles also can also reflect location, spending patterns, shopping preferences and much more. Google is very smart about taking all these into account.
Organic Source Material
Current theory is that Google places priority on personal profiles in search results; after the personal profile, it then looks at the local website’s content to determine which sites are a good match to the search. The content of the site is often labeled as “organic” because it is grown, created, and controlled by the owner of the site. By organic, we mean things only contained within the website itself and nothing external. Google looks at each site, at the words, images, media and code. It then makes judgements about these based on common patterns. Repeating a keyword too much can drop the value of a page. Only mentioning a key word once can mean the page merits only low rankings. Having key words in headings, page titles and your page name URL all can affect how Google ranks the page. The current theory is to make page have high value through optimal use of key words in each of these areas.
External Valid One-way Links
Although there are perhaps a dozen other smaller factors involved in ranking search results, the last big category would most likely be one-way links. Years ago when Google started, one-way links were given very, very high value when determining rankings. The more links coming from outside websites into your site, the more ‘popular’ Google believe the website was and popular sites were given higher ranking. The problem came when SEO professionals started creating hundreds of thousands of websites with one way links into client sites just to boost rankings. One method of one-way link building is known as article ‘syndication’. There are lots of services out there offering to publish your article to thousands of sties with one way links. However, Google is smart—very smart. Currently they are watching these syndicated services and ‘de-valuing’ them. Meaning, they only want to see valid one-way links to your site by reputable sources and it is possible that using syndication service may actually damage your rankings. At this point it safe to say valid websites with one way links help your ratings and that you are risking lowering your rankings through using syndication services.
Organic SEO Basics
So, what can you do with organic SEO? Simply put, if you focus on improving your site in a few basic areas you’ll see improvements in your rankings:
- Page specific keywords
- Page specific metatags
- Keyword related page titles
- Keyword specific page URLs (SEF search engine friendly)
- Logical use of H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags (header HTML tags)
- Optimized keyword usage in body tag text
- Internal linking of key words
- Individual pages for important keywords
- Site map
- Search engine friendly navigation (non-flash)
- Larger sites with more pages devoted to key word subjects tend to do better
- Blogs with regular posting activity
Of course there are dozens of other tweaks that can be done to a site, but the above list is a great starting point and highly recommended for those trying to do just the basics of creating a better ‘organic’ site. In the end, it’s really all about creating a site which has better and more effective content and one that search engines can easily digest for their rankings.