Last month we started our article series on the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) by dispelling some commonly held myths and misconceptions.  Now that we talked about what doesn’t work, let’s continue by talking about what does work.

There are two main criteria that search engine evaluate when ranking your website pages in their indexes:

1. The CONTENT of the web page (the words on the page)
2. The LINKS pointing to that web page

Content:

This part is the most straightforward.  Search engine algorithms don’t see your page’s layout, design, or pictures.  All they see is a long string of words and text.  So how do they know what a particular web page is about?  By reading the words, of course. Suppose you had a website for a bakery company.  If the site pages have lots of words like “fresh bread,” “cakes,” and “chocolate chip cookies,” then they will be more likely to show up prominently when people search for those terms.  However, if the site was filled with text talking about the company’s history, equipment, employees’ bios, and so on, but doesn’t have much text talking about their actual baked products, then of course it will never show up in searches for specific baked products.  So make sure your website content actually talks about the subjects you’d like people to find you for!

Links:

When Google or the other search engines see two web pages with similar content, how do they determine which site is ranked higher for their corresponding search queries? Simple: whichever site has the most links pointing to it.  Basically, search engines don’t only look at your site content; they also look at links between sites to determine the relative importance of different websites’ content. For instance, if many different sites have links to one of your web pages that say something like “Bread Bakeries in Denver,” then that tells the search engines that your page must be a very important page about bread bakeries in Denver, and will increase your site ranking correspondingly.

Additionally, the incoming links to your website are weighted differently according to which website they came from. The search engines rank the importance and authority of the site linking to yours by — you guessed it — how many other sites link to them.  So a link to your site from CNN.com, for instance, is much more valuable than, say, a link from “Uncle Joe’s Crab Shack,” or some other small website.

So just remember:

• Links to your website = good
• Links to your site from high-profile websites = even better

With an understanding of these two key principles of search engine indexing, you’re well on your way to understanding how to increase your chances of featuring prominently on search results to your target audience.  Next month, we’ll discuss the most important areas on your website pages to focus your attention on as you optimize your website content to be search-engine-friendly.

In the meantime, if you have any additional questions about search engine optimization, feel free to contact us.

When we’re first planning a new website with our clients and we’re discussing their objectives for their website, one of the things they invariably say to us is “I want to be number one on Google.”  Thus, whether they know it or not, what they are looking for is search engine optimization (SEO): gaining high search result rankings in the keywords that their target audience is searching for.  Now, search engine optimization is a big subject — way more than just one article can cover.  So let’s start off by debunking some of the big myths and misconceptions about SEO out there.

Myth #1: It’s all about your pages’ meta tags.

What’s a meta tag?  It’s a series of optional descriptive tags that you can put in your website’s code.  Two commonly used meta tags are a “description” meta tag, and a “keywords” meta tag.  Stuffing your meta tags with your target keywords is often thrown around as good SEO advice. However, this is completely useless. Years ago, Google and the other search engines used web page’s meta tags to help them rank their search results.  However, people caught onto this and began stuffing their meta tags with huge lists of keywords to try and boost their rankings.  Because of this abuse, the search engine companies eventually stopped paying attention to anything put inside a website’s meta tags at all.

Myth #2: You should submit your site to 500+ search engines in order to boost your rankings.

Some SEO companies will say something like this in their sales pitch to you.  It sounds great, right?  It’s also completely unnecessary.  Why?  Nowadays there’s only 3 big search engines out there: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google is the 800-pound gorilla of the search engine industry, with 70% market share.  Yahoo and Bing fight over the remaining 30% of market share. (Ask.com is a distant runner-up, with about 1–2% market share.)  Any other search engine out there either licenses the technology from one of the companies above, or gets so little traffic that it’s statistically insignificant.

Myth #3: “We can guarantee you a #1 ranking in Google.”

This is perhaps the most insidious SEO myth out there.  It sounds great, doesn’t it?  The only problem is that no one can guarantee anything when it comes to search engine rankings.  The search engine companies keep their ranking algorithms secret (and are constantly shifting them as well), in order to keep people and companies from “gaming the system” to manipulate the search results in their favor. So while you can build your website following best practices to increase your chances of favorable search result rankings, there is no magic potion to “guarantee #1 results.”  If a company brags that they can guarantee you a certain ranking, they are lying.

Now what?

With these common myths debunked, you may be wondering if there’s anything you can do to improve your chances of high search rankings.  Actually, there is quite a bit!  Join us next month as we talk about some of the foundational principles of optimizing your website for the search engines.  In the meantime, if you have any additional questions about search engine optimization, drop us a line and we’ll be glad to help.

Dakota Farms is a cooperative of family-owned bison and beef ranchers in several midwestern states in the US, along with several provinces in Canada. They hired us to build a consumer-facing website with information about the families on the ranches that produce their meat products, along with recipe and cooking information for bison and beef. We built the new website in the Drupal content management system. With this new site, Dakota Farms can create a page with a biography and photo collage for each of their participating ranch families, accessible to end users through a menu page listing all the participating ranch families.

A page for one of the participating ranch families

In addition, we also created a section of the website for listing various bison and beef recipes, along with cooking tips and instructions.  The recipe pages are entirely jQuery-powered, with an accordion menu in the left-side dynamically updating the recipe displayed on the page, all without needing a page refresh. Since these pages are also powered by the Drupal platform, Dakota Farms can add, edit and manage recipes, images and cooking tips as easily as they can manage the pages for their participating ranch families.

The Bison Info & Recipes page

We launched the website in April. You can find the newly-launched website here: www.YourRancher.com. Come check it out!

If you’re interested in our help in building a website for your own company or organization, contact us and we will be happy to talk with you.