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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Look carefully at the words, are we optimizing the search engines Yahoo and Google? No, instead what it actually means is optimizing web pages for search engines.

Why do you need to optimize your web pages or do SEO?

A lot of people can design very beautiful and amazing websites with very well written content. However, without proper SEO, there will not be many visitors to the websites because most Internet users still find websites by searching on search engines and directories. Without proper SEO, websites have very low chance of appearing in search engine search results and very low listing in directories. In short, search engine optimization is crucial for anyone who wants more people to visit his or her website.

SEO Explained

Search engine optimization is the process of making web pages friendly and attractive to search engines. Most people who use search engines only look at the first one or two pages of search results, thus in order to get visitors from search engines, you have to get your web pages listed on those crucial first couple of pages.

How do you do that? I am a no expert in SEO, below are just some simple guidelines:

1. Choose and use appropriate keywords in your webpages.
   Keywords are the terms that search engine users enter in the search box to conduct a search. The right keywords or phrases are those that:
   • Best describes the topic and content of your page.
   • Is a popular search term according to Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool or Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
   • Generates a relatively small number of results in a search engine search.
2. Put the keywords or phrase that you’ve chosen in the webpage’s title tag, meta keywords, and meta description. Although some search engines do not look at these anymore, but the majority still consider these as high priority especially search engines like MSN. Make sure that the meta description is as appealing as possible, because some search engines actually use this description in the search engine results pages that people will be reading.

   “Untitled page” is a big no no. Some webpage editing softwares such as FrontPage uses the default title name “Untitled page” if you didn’t supply a name. If you used such software, make sure you name the title appropriately.

3. Name your webpage’s filename with the keywords that you have chosen or with a phrase that includes the keywords. This is very important because one of the first things some search engines look at is the filename of the page. Some older search engines do not index or read complex web URLs properly, especially those with query parameters in them. In cases where the query parameters are not avoidable, it is advised that you look into mod_rewrite where it will change complex URLs into search engine friendly URLs. Mod_rewrite has been employed by this blog.
4. Be sure your chosen keywords or phrase is repeated throughout the content of the webpage. However make sure you don’t overdo it, or your page may be treated as a spam, but you need to repeat it enough times that the search engine’s robot will consider the phrase relevant.

   Some webmasters try to fool search engines by listing a lot of similar keywords on a page, mostly at the bottom of the page, and make the font color very close to the page’s background color. Although this trick worked in some smaller search engines, I would strongly not advise it. You will get your whole website delisted in no time.

The above are just some of my 2 cents worth of SEO guidelines. Hope we all learnt something from it.

Cheers and happy SEO