seo

Today, search engines work much like a phone book directory used to – just on a much larger scale. How your company’s site is found can be difficult with so many options available. To single out you company’s website from the mass of information on the web, it is vital to make use Search Engine Optimization (or SEO).

People have made a shift towards using the Internet to help them in their daily activities. Search engine optimization helps you to get higher rankings in search engines and so, guide more traffic towards your website. In short it can be said that search engine optimization’s goal is to make a website appear on the first pages, if not the very first page of a search done through the search engine.

The Internet Digest provides us with 3 fundamental stages of optimizing your website. The first stage is to choose the right keywords. The right keywords are those that “clearly describe the purpose and content of your site, and allow your site to show up as close to the first results page as possible”. Secondly, you need to optimize your pages for your selected keywords. On all the pages of your website you need to position your keywords in strategic locations. The last stage is to make sure that you get linked from the best directories and from lots of quality sites with a related topic.

It seems that the last stage really is the most important. For Mike Perk, Co-founder of the energetic web marketing company World Wide Creative, the most important thing is relevant links pointing back to your site. Mike explains linking in Google terms: “Google is looking for the centre of authority on a particular topic or search term. It does this by looking at where all the links point to and seeing who has the most relevant to that topic/search term. That’s the one that goes to the top.” So from my understanding, linking is basically a case of the site with the most links that refer back to them will have the highest ranking.

Gabriel Weinberg runs a search engine called Duck Duck Go. For Gabriel, it is important to have attractive URL’s and page titles but the thing that matters most is external link texts. “Google often repeats that they use more than 200 ranking factors. In my experience, external link texts matter way more than anything else. That is, the actual words in the links back to your sites and pages.”

But now, SEO might already be expanding to other fields and evolving. According to Mike “what has become extremely interesting in the last year and something that will continue to grow, is the type of content Google is indexing and rating highly. Video, images, mapping, etc are finding their way to the top of the search a lot more easily than new text content.” We should pay close attention to this expansion into multimedia fields. It could mean more ways to SEO than simply text-based content and URL’s.