Search Engine Optimization

With business transactions on the Internet in the billions of dollars, no business can afford to ignore this enormous opportunity to expand its market share. To succeed in this competitive global marketplace, businesses need to develop a highly competitive website presence, and then drive significant traffic to the website. Search engine optimization is the art of optimizing a website for maximum visibility on various search engines and directories, thereby likely increasing the amount of potential customer traffic to that website.

Weidenhammer understands how important ranking well on popular search engines is to your business and its future. We stay current on the latest trends and methods used to rank effectively. If Weidenhammer is building your new website, we work with you to be sure your content is optimized for the search engines correctly the first time. We can also optimize legacy websites without the expense of a redevelopment effort. We also consult on the use of fee-based directories and sponsor listings. Leveraging Weidenhammer's significant experience developing websites and optimizing their content for search engines can greatly increase your visibility on the Internet and drive a new demographic of customers to your business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the task of optimizing the content of a website to increase its search results ranking for targeted key phrases on popular search engines. In the early days of SEO, web masters could simply stuff keywords into the meta tags of each page on their website and have search engine spiders find those words and add them to their databases. Unfortunately, too many unscrupulous web masters started stuffing hot keywords in their meta tags that had absolutely nothing to do with their websites. Referring searchers to websites that contained content far from what the searcher intended was quickly degrading search engine effectiveness. Today’s search engines largely ignore the content in meta tags. Instead, their ranking algorithms reward sites that contain key phrase rich text content displayed directly to the visitor. In addition, and just as important, the engines inspect other website links to your website, and handsomely reward sites that have many prominent links coming in directly related to specific topics.

The following steps suggest how Weidenhammer performs search engine optimization:

Step 1: Key Phrase Research

The very core of search engine optimization is the research and selection of key phrases that target your intended website audience. The goal of this step is to identify all words that your audience will use when doing searches. It is very important to identify phrases of words since today’s web searchers are largely not typing in single words, but rather trying to create better search results by typing in phrases. Knowing an exact phrase your target audience routinely uses is a bonus, as your site will rank higher if that exact phrase is found throughout your content.

Optimal key phrases can be derived from the search engines themselves. Tools exist that can query search engine databases of user’s search strings. By typing in a single word, these tools return all the popular phrases the searching Internet public typed in to various engines containing that word. Finding the exact phrases your intended audience routinely uses is a big step in eventually getting that audience to visit your website.


Step 2: Website Architecture

Search engines have been crawling web pages on the Internet for years. Their spiders follow every link on every page trying to glean all the content they can find. When designing a website, it is important to understand how the spiders operate and cater to their needs. Spiders are very successful at crawling websites that have plenty of navigation points to all pages. Sitemaps are a wonderful way to provide intuitive navigation to both the spiders and your visitors.

A search engine friendly website architecture is all about doing the simple things and avoiding all the wrong things that designers like to employ to make a site more attractive. For example, search engine spiders cannot read text content inside flash movies. Therefore, all-flash sites rank poorly in organic search results listings. The spiders also cannot navigate DHTML style menu systems. Although these visually attractive menus make a site look cutting edge, they are a showstopper for search engine optimization. The spiders also cannot index web pages that require cookies or a login to view pages.

Web pages built using frames can be crawled by the spiders without too much difficulty. However, it is important to test inside pages for consistency to make sure they display properly when linked to directly from the outside and not from the website navigation system. Also, websites that display content contained in databases can be successfully optimized for the search engines. In this situation, it is important to provide a mechanism in the database and programming where each unique page can be given its own page title and meta tags so key phrases can be dispersed across the entire site.

The best website architectures usually end up being the ones that are simple yet elegant, allowing the visitor to intuitively find the information they want on the site while also providing a robust linking structure that is spider friendly.


Step 3: Web Page HTML Optimization

Each web page is indexed and stored independently in search engine databases. HTML optimization is the task of taking one or two researched key phrases per page and working those phrase variations into every content holder of that page. These holders vary in importance to the spiders and include page titles, page headers, text copy, text links, image alt tags, and meta tags. A well optimized website will contain enough key phrase rich copy to satisfy the spiders while still reading naturally to visitors.

The notion to stuff key phrases beyond reasonability on a page seems to rear its ugly head at this point in the process. However, the spiders have seen just about everything and will quickly thwart any shortcut attempts. Text copy that is the same color as the background, or a tiny font, or displayed off the normal viewing area will be ignored. The rule of thumb is simple here, all copy that is naturally visible to the website visitor will be indexed by the spiders. Furthermore, text that draws a human eye, like larger page headings or clickable link text, is given more weight when ranking a page. Again, simply publishing clear readable copy that contains variations of your selected key phrases will yield the best results for search results ranking on those phrases.

Step 4: Implement a Linking Strategy

Search engines rank websites based on how important they appear on the Internet for a particular topic. Popular websites tend to have many incoming links from other websites. The search engines keep track of the number of sites that link to your site, and will increase your value when you become a common thread based on your selected topics. Keep in mind that having links on your site to other sites does not help you. But, having other sites link to your site, especially popular sites, will have a significant impact on your ranking. In the case where two websites have very similarly optimized content, the site with the best incoming link score will be ranked higher.

Instead of randomly placing outgoing links on your website, try getting the other website to link back to you. This becomes increasingly more difficult as the site linking back to you becomes more popular. Your website must contain useful information that may not be easily found on the Internet. Linking to this information may add value to another website and prompt them to link to you. The puzzle pieces start to fit together here, as the common theme becomes targeted content. Your targeted audience is looking for valuable information on your website, which feeds the spider to get you better ranking for that content, which motivates other sites to link to you, thereby further increasing your ranking. In the world of search engine optimization, targeted content is king.


Step 5: Submit to the Directories

Complementing the spider-based search engines discussed above are Internet directories. Think of these as the Internet yellow pages. Every website submitted is reviewed by a human editor and then a listing is placed in an appropriate category. Directory searchers navigate through a hierarchy to arrive at the category where your website is listed, along with other websites offering the same products or services. Some categories contain many listings, while others only have a few. It can be harder to be noticed in an Internet directory, but having your website draw traffic from another source can be a plus.

DMOZ was the original database of websites on the Internet, and Google maintains this database today. These directory links are found in Google search results, as well as from the Google directory tab. Submission to DMOZ is free and many search engines outside Google reference its contents in their results listings. Yahoo is also a very popular directory that can drive significant traffic to a website. Once free, Yahoo now charges an annual fee to be part of their directory. Other directories can be submitted to as well with varying degrees of success in visitor referral traffic.