Today’s Internet world is dominated by search engines. We are at their mercy if we want people to find our sites without hearing about it first through traditional advertising sources. So we can do one of two things – either we protest outside of Google and Yahoo headquarters, or we can follow the rules to search engine optimization (SEO). For now, lets leave the protesting on the backburner and move into a couple of major SEO points to make note of.

CSS:
By now you may have heard about CSS style sheets. CSS style sheets have a two-pronged affect to your web design. Firstly, it makes it much easier to make site-wide changes to content. Before CSS style sheets were in the mainstream, if you wanted to change the color of a particular part of you page, you would have to go into the code for every single one of your pages that need the color change and change the color there. With CSS, you only have to make that change once inside of the CSS file. Secondly, they help make your site more search engine friendly.

With CSS you can position the content anywhere on the page. This, of course could be done before by using tables. The problem with tables is that they take a lot of computing power to render the tables. And the sites out there that use multiple tables inside of other tables, the rendering takes exponentially longer. So using CSS style sheets makes your site more search engine friendly and also is friendlier to your users.

Accessibility:
In order to optimize your website completely you have to make is accessible to all users including those users with disabilities. By doing this you also make your website more search engine friendly because a lot of the web accessibility standards concurrently helps search engines to prioritize, organize, and rank your content. If you would like, review the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines here. http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/. If you do not believe that accessibility is an important feature of SEO, just read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769.

To summarize the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, follow these steps in your website:

• Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element using attributes such as “alt” and “longdesc”:
• Search engines are blind and deaf. Therefore they cannot “view” an image or video, or listen to a sound file. In order to let the search engine “in the loop”, you must provide descriptions of what content is provided in the video, sound, or image files.
• Provide redundant text links for each image map link:
• Once again if you are linking to other pages through an image, search engines have a difficult time figuring out how to categorize that link if it can’t actually “read” the image. So if you do use image maps on your site, you should also have textual links provided on your page that link to the same locations. This makes it much easier for the search engine.
• Identify any changes in the natural language of the document’s text
• In order to make it easier for search engines to index the content on your page, explicitly stating what languages are being used and where they are being used on your page is important.
• Make sure your page is still able to be used when certain web capabilities are turned off or not supported such as Javascript, Flash, or images
• Just because your computer supports Javascript or some other type of language, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world does. Sometimes someone’s computer will support the language; however they may have turned off that capability. Similarly, a user might have turned off all images, all sounds, or all videos. It is important to have a backup plan. Normally you can put some code into your page that will show something different if their computer does not support a specific type of programming language.

Meta Tags:
Most people have heard about using meta tags on their webpage to show search engines what your page is all about. There are various meta tags that you can use but the two most important are “keywords” and “description”.

The keywords should be the best words to describe the content on the page. These are words or groups of words separated by commas. The trick here is to actually have content located on the pages that are related to your keywords. If there is no relationship between your content and your keywords, you are not helping yourself out from a SEO point of view.

Descriptions are also very important. Just like the keywords they also describe what type of content is on your site. The description normally shows up on search engines when people search for your keywords. For example, if someone was to search for “widgets in Canada” and your page is found, the search engine will show your link along with your description. Descriptions range in size but are usually approximately 160 characters in length. So don’t make your description too long. Something short and sweet usually does well.

Sitemaps:
Sitemaps are used as a summary of what you can find on your site. It is normally a list of all the different pages and shows how each page is related to each other. For example:

Home

• Products
• Widgets
• Ding Dongs
• Service
• Installation
• Delivery
• Contact Us

Many people create an entire page called “sitemap”, but there are other ways to go about this. Search engines such as Google have utilities that allow you to create a Google Sitemap. This basically takes all the pages and subpages on your site and inputs them into Google’s database to make indexing easier. This is a free service and provides more than just sitemaps, but also website analytics and diagnostic tools.

Changing content:
It is also important to have changing and updating content on your page. This shows search engines that your page is up-to-date and not old and useless. This can be accomplished by implementing a blog or allowing users to comment on certain sections of your webpage.

Content is King:
Content is king. No matter how well you optimize your website for search engines, the content itself is the key to success. No one will even come close to finding your page if your content is not fresh, up-to-date, and informative.

The best thing to do is find a niche and exploit this on your website. Maybe through a blog or a section that shows tips and tricks within your niche is helpful. It is information like this that will get people to come to your site. If you successfully present yourself as an expert in your field on your website, people will start using your site to get information they need. And when they are ready to purchase, they are more likely to purchase from you since you are the expert.

Links to your site:
Once you have optimized your site to the best of your ability and have provided useful content, eventually you will get people linking to your site as a source of information. This is very important because your page rank (how high up the list of search terms your site falls) is partially dependant on how many other sites link to your page. If you think about it, this makes sense because if a lot of people link to your site, it is safe to say that your site is more relevant than another site that has no links to it. But remember, content is king.  If you provide good content there will be people who link to your site.

Another way to go about this is to submit your site into as many relevant directories as you can find. There are many directories found on the internet that will allow you to provide your URL to them for free. Try going here http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-directories.html and see what free directories you find there. They usually just require some keywords and a description. This helps, but content is still king.

Conclusion:
Simply put, the purpose of SEO is to make it easier for search engines to find, index, and rank your page so that people searching for information can find the most relevant information possible. The exact formula used by search engines to index and rank sites is not completely known, and in fact changes all the time. So for a regular person to do SEO work on their site, the best thing to do is follow the steps outlined here. As long as you present your page in a search engine friendly manner and provide quality content, you won’t have to worry about protesting outside Google headquarters. Happy optimizing!