That's a no-brainer. But sometimes actually accomplishing this goal is anything but simple. With all the new rules put out by the major search engines, getting your site in front of your potential customer is often like navigating a very complex and technical labyrinth. We've broken down search engine optimization (SEO) into some manageable bites so you can start with the basics.

The Role of Keywords

If you have run a keyword popularity report on Wordtracker.com looking for popular Search Engine Optimization terms and created a list of the most searched words in your field, you know that you need include these words in your website in order to be found by the search engines. But how should you do that?

SEO, in Denver and nationally used to simply be a matter of placing keywords in specific places so when a search engine does its searching, your site is found easily. Search engines operate with spiders, or web crawlers, that crawl through websites and find those that have words most closely matching the words in the search bar of the browser. Keywords in page titles, page descriptions, and what web designers call META tags were the ones that The search engine spiders looked for.

Due to this, website designers started to put keywords into the content at alarming rates. You might have seen an example of this when you read an article that seemed to be incredibly redundant. The copywriter was using keywords on a large scale to attract the attention of web crawlers and therefore, place at the top of the search results.

Currently, this issue better understood by search engines like Google, who are looking for websites that are the most user-friendly. And user-friendly does not mean the same thing as keyword dense. Because of this, keyword placement is much more natural. Don't overload your copy with keywords, and don't place keywords in your page titles or descriptions nor in your META tags that have nothing to do with the website or content on that page. You will not attract the latest form of web crawler.

Understanding Links

To achieve even more precise Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Denver businesses have tried joining linking services or automatic link communities. The motivation for making use of these activities has been to boost their ranking on search engines by showing the web crawlers that they are linked to from dozens of websites across the Internet. The problem with this is similar to the keyword trend described above.

Today, search engines use a number of factors to rank their results. They match keywords, yes, but they also look at the usability of the site by analyzing the websites that link to it. So if you sell patio furniture and you have links to your site from pool companies and gardening websites, this is a good sign that your site offers quality information recommended by other professionals.

If you use a linking service that simply sets up reciprocal links between your site and random other sites, such as a bus driver, the search engine's spider will see this as a trick to get higher search results and not an indication of the usefulness of your site. So employ only valid techniques that actually provide value to your audience.