When I say SEO, what do you immediately think? Some may answer and say isn’t he that guy from the Matrix Movies, others may reply and name it correctly but they may not understand its meaning.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the natural (organic) or un-paid search results. In general, the higher ranked and more frequently your site appears in the search engine results, will translate into more visits from search engine users.
The Process
A search engine indexing (collection and storage of site data) from your website is used to produce fast and accurate information to the search engine user. Search engines index your site based on a list of defined parameters in a giant algorithm that is maintained by the Search Engine designers. Each search engine has its own unique algorithm that is proprietary and kept a secret.
For example, when I first launched www.Intimate-Boudoir.com, my site was showing on the first page of Yahoo and Bing for the term Boudoir Photography, however Google ranked my site on page 14 of its results. While the Yahoo and Bing rankings were a huge surprise to me, they eventually evened out and I lost that coveted first page ranking. One the many reasons my site dropped on Yahoo and Bing was due to the algorithm changing.
Search Engines index your content by crawling your site and based off of what you have listed in your robots.txt or your <meta> robots tag will effect what content and where on your site you permit the search engine crawler to index your site. Wait a minute, robots, crawlers, spiders what is this? A another Harry Potter movie? A search engine spider or robot are what search engines use to crawl or comb over your website and index your content based on what keywords, page title, url, alt/title tags, and page description is found within that specific pages content. Then the search engine assigns a value to that page based on the keywords within the page, this is where your site ranking comes from.
A Flashy Website
When a Search Engine crawls your graphically enhanced or Flash website, what exactly does it look like to the crawler? Well take a look for yourself and go to www.Seo-Browser.com and type your website into the Address box and click simple. Guess what the crawlers sees? TEXT! Nothing but text! So this goes back to why I constantly preach to photographers who use Flash as their main website content to switch to something like a blog or simple HTML website. If you are one of those flashy photographers don’t get mad at me and stop reading. With technology in programming languages advancing tremendously over the past couple years we are able to achieve the effects of flash without using flash. So you can talk to your local web developer and transform that Flash Website into a content rich HTML based power house.
What have we learned
In conclusion we learned what SEO means, how a search engine crawls your site, and what your website looks to a crawler. Based on this you can start to draw a picture on how important it is to have content rich websites that is relevant to the keywords and url of your domain. My next lesson I will go into how to control search engines and how to protect content that you don’t want to get indexed.
