Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of getting your website to appear in the top rankings of search engine results for relevant search terms.

If you had a website that sold antique china, then “antique china” would probably be a targeted search term for your type of business. If your website was search engine optimized, then, your website would appear at least in the top 10 results whenever “antique china” or a related term was entered into Google’s search box.

(Note: by results I mean the natural results provided by the search engine, according to it’s own ranking algorithm. I do not mean the “sponsored links,” whose positions are purchased directly just like one might purchase a billboard along a certain highway.)

How does this happen? There are at least four major factors that determine where your website will appear in the search engine results.

* Web Content Writing
* Key term selection, density & page structure
* Site architecture, information & link structure
* Inbound Links (the quantity and quality of other websites that link to yours.)

It is difficult to say which factor is most important for a number of reasons. First, each search engine assigns varying weights to each factor. For example, Google rates inbound links (“external content”) very highly; whereas Yahoo assigns more weight to the web content writing (“internal content.”) Second, the importance of each factor will depend largely upon the nature of your website, and particularly, the sophistication of your competition.

As an extreme example, suppose your website offers the service of “search engine optimization.” Obviously you are going to be up against the stiffest competition imaginable. In this case your website will need to be impeccable in all of these aspects.

At the opposite extreme, if your website offers a local service of a non-IT nature, lets say a clothing retail business in Houston, Texas, then you may do fine by simply focusing upon having a good amount of web content with the proper word density/ratio.

In most cases, however, at least some attention will need to be given to all of these aspects of search engine optimization; and the likelihood of this will only increase over time as practically every industry will realize the importance of a strong web presence and high search engine rankings.

If you are serious about becoming competitive and staying competitive by using this marketing strategy, Informationarchitech is the answer. Click here to request SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services.

Tags: search engine optimization, seo

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 10th, 2005 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.