Billions have been written about SEO and even a hundred billion more would be written on Search Engine Optimization. I will attempt to describe the meaning of Search Engine Optimization in layman’s terms and suggest a few ways in which you can implement them on your websites and blogs.

Search Engine Optimization is important to be able to get into the search engine directories (refer to the Popular Tips tab on the side for more information). And chances are that we could be incorrectly categorized in these databases or worse, eliminated completely from being included in the search engine databases! So when a visitor looks up, say Google Search, for content very relevant to yours, they wont find you in the Search Results!

What is Search Engine Optimization:

Search Engine Optimization in very simple terms is to create a web page that could be very easily interpreted by any of the Search Engines (like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask etc). Periodically, each of these Search Engines send out robots or crawlers over the internet that looks up all the pages available. These robots and crawlers then finds your website, looks through the pages and content and attempts to index or catalog it into its database. If these robots and crawlers do not like your website, they will skip and move on to the next!

Why is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) important:

Thus its is important to know what attracts these robots and crawlers and what makes it easy for them to catalog your web pages into their directory. In even simpler analogy, think of you driving to the book store In the analogy the bookstore represents your website on the internet and you are the robot who is trying to index the content. If the directions are too complicated to one store, you might simply drive to another one. If the directions are easy, you will be on time at the store.

Now once you reach your book store, if the books are all unorganized and the staff are not helpful, you will not find the book you want. This does not mean that the book (or content) is not present, there might as well be hundreds of copies lying around. Very similar to an extremely complicated, confusing structure of a website.

Now that you have found the book, you are looking up for something similar and you find books with different covers but with the same content. As if like someone wants to sell you the same book more than once hoping that the different cover will fool you. This is the issue of duplicate contents that the robots face. And they are not patient! They have billions of other sites to search so they simply dump your website as fraudulent and move on.

On the other hand, if the bookstore and your website is cleanly organized, with staff and placards showing you where to find what you need, and books with different covers are actually different books, you could quickly buy your books (finish cataloging) and promise to come back later. A neatly laid out style of the website, a defined place to look for information and a good definition of the content helps robots to index sites appropriately.

5 simple ways in which you can make your site Search Engine friendly:

So what are these placards and how would you style your website so that they are friendly to robots and crawlers? It is actually quite simply. Even though the web page may appear very complicated from outside, the “header” part of the web page contains most of the information that is needed by search engine robots & crawlers. Here are the 5 basic things that you could do very easily to make your website SEO friendly:

1. Have the Page Title very relevant to your content. The Title is defined in the Header of a web page. Make the Title explanatory and use Google Trends and Search Analytics to find keywords you should use to make up the page’s Title.

2. Have a very explanatory Description of your website in the Header. These are part of META fields, which does not change the look and feel to the visitor but makes or breaks your cataloging possibilities with Search Engines. Keep the Description within 80 - 150 characters and try to use words and phrases that are searched by people and relevant to your content.

3. There is another META information called Keywords that you should use extremely cautiously. Again, use keywords that are firstly relevant to your content and then use words and phrases that are synonymous to what people are searching the internet. In one of my earlier posts I mentioned the huge difference that using (or not using) plurals could make - the word “blogs” is searched more frequently than the word “blog” for example.

4. Let the search engine crawlers know if they would find duplicate content in your website. It is all right to structure your content in any way you want. But having let the search engine crawlers know you stand a better chance of being cataloged and not completely ignored as fraud! Use the “NOINDEX” instruction for robots and crawlers on pages where you feel there could be duplicates - like Archive Pages or Tag Pages or Catalog Pages in your blogs.

5. And lastly, have a simple design. The most difficult part for robots to navigate through are the interlaced tables - having one table within another and even more within that! Using style sheets could eliminate a lot of the navigational issued caused by these complicated and confusing table structures.

The Search Engine Optimization is a quite big topic by itself. And there are small and medium internet companies that solely thrive on helping others to optimize. These are however the easy five ways in which you can achieve a large part of it all by yourself.

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