If you’re like many small businesses, you probably spent a lot of time (and money) pulling together a web site for your company, only to find that in order to be found in the search engines, your site needs to be optimized.
Why is it necessary to optimize a web site for the search engines in the first place? Basically, it’s because there are millions and millions of web sites on the internet today, all different, with no standardized mechanism for indexing or organizing the information they contain. It’s like a giant internet encyclopedia with no table of contents to help users find what they’re looking for.
Search engines were developed in an attempt to organize all of that web information and make it searchable and relevant for users. In the early days of search engines, web authors could simply add “keywords” to the meta data (the behind-the-scenes code) of a web site to let the search engines know what keywords they wanted their sites to be associated with. But eventually, people started using all kinds of keywords that had nothing to do with their site content, and abuse of the system ultimately meant that the search engines had to get smarter about how they organized and evaluated web sites, and how they judged a site’s relevance to any given search.
Today, web sites must rely on search engine optimization techniques and well-optimized web pages in order to get noticed by the search engines, and ultimately found by searchers on the web. Since Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most effective way to achieve higher rankings in the search engines, it’s important to understand the differences between a web site and an optimized web site, and also to know the basic SEO building blocks that are used to prepare a site to be read, indexed, and ultimately judged relevant by the search engines.
Optimized vs. Non-Optimized
A non-optimized web site might display perfectly fine on the web, but the search engines will all but ignore it. The search engines need to see certain optimizations in place before they can read and include the site into their databases. Some of the basic optimization techniques typically used in SEO include: 1) adding meta tags such as keywords, title, description, etc., 2) including on-page optimizations, e.g., using keywords effectively in the page text, and 3) initiating external link-building activities to boost the relevance and popularity of a web site. An optimized web site will have these elements (and probably several others), which will then help the search engines understand what the site is about and what search terms it should be associated with.
There are, however, several types of sites that cannot easily be read or indexed by the search engines, including frames-based, image-based, or Flash-based sites. Template-based sites can also be a problem in certain instances, since they frequently prohibit individual page code access or block edits to the HTML meta data tags. These types of sites are contradictory to the idea behind SEO, which is to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to read and index a site, and provide the right kinds of “clues” so the search engines can determine which search terms should be associated with the site.
The Case for Optimization
The clear message of SEO is that without optimizing your web site to be read and indexed effectively by the search engines, there’s very little chance that it will show up when users search for the products and services that you sell. Your web site, no matter how beautiful or impressive, is still just one of millions on the web today, all competing for attention. If your competitors take the time and effort to optimize their web sites with well-researched keywords, on-page optimizations, and link building activities, the search engines will understandably pay more attention to those sites than to sites that do not provide any SEO structure or components.
Research shows that the way customers look for information online is through the search engines (more than 74% of all web users, in fact). So it’s vital that you give your web site every possible opportunity to be listed where customers are already searching. SEO is currently the best tool available for getting your web site listed in the search engines, and for influencing the way in which the search engines judge your site’s relevance to the specific search terms and phrases that people use when searching on the web.
Without SEO, your site could very easily be lost in the massive amount of information on the web, without any of the landmarks or signposts necessary to help people locate your business. With SEO, your site stands a much better chance of being noticed by the search engines, indexed into their databases, and displayed on their results pages when searchers look for information on the web.