Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, comes with many definitions depending on who you ask. In general SEO points to the process of optimizing your web pages so that search engines will index them to your best advantage possible. It involves making sure that pages include the right keywords, that they are used in specific places like header tags, and that there's plenty of good relevant content. These are all relevant concepts, but they should be addressed with real people using the website in mind, not search engine spiders. The core principles behind visitor friendliness or 'factors of good business conduct' are secular and very similar to the way search engines look at things.
You see, there is no such thing as a perfectly optimized page or site. Search engines don't want the perfect SEO'd site — they are more interested in what pages best fit what their users are looking and searching for. Overusing so called SEO techniques may even negatively influence your search rank.
The goal of optimizing your site is to try and match all the quality signs that visitors value and search engines look for. Overdoing keywords, emphasis and bolding will make your site look unnatural for visitors and search engines alike. It can helpful to ask yourself this question, "If I didn't own the site, would I still visit it on a regular basis?"
If too many of the page elements have the same text, the content will be unattractive for a visitor and look unnatural to a search engine. They might even think somebody is trying to manipulate them! The same is true for incoming or 'inbound' links. If all your inbound links have the same text, it can feel unnatural, and it may seem that you're trying to inflate your link popularity. To remedy this, try to mix things up a bit. Make your story interesting read and don't stuff it with keywords (we wrote about keywords and keyword prominence as far back as in 2006).
Key and stop word Usage:
Keywords should be used where relevant, in paragraphs, header text, links and as alternative text for images. After all, if a site is about cars, some car related links, pictures and so on are expected right? There are also a few things that you should not do with keywords.
Stopwords are words that don't convey meaning when used in isolation. Examples are words like 'me', 'a', and 'the'. In context, when used in a sentence, they can help the searcher find what he or she is looking for. Website Insight allows you to filter them out for better keyword analysis. They will (and should) still be part of any naturally written document or text though!
SEO Resources:
Now that you have all this information about your website, we are sure you are asking yourself “What do I do now?”. Sifting through pages and pages of SEO books can be extremely frustrating and overwhelming.
What we have done here is put together a list of potential problems found on this page along with some suggestions on how to improve things. Making these changes will help you get on the path to having not only a better website, but to boost your rankings in the search engines.
We put together an SEO Resources page in case you would like to read more.
