Basics of Electronic Media

In this, the first of four sections, I will discuss the basics of search engine optimization, the use of keywords, meta-tags, and tools for getting the best ranking possible for your site.

Following sections discuss graphics, widgets and iFrames, and rules for copy/text. I will continue to add to these pages, and update them as needed, but always with an eye to the novice.

Please follow the links and learn more about graphics, widgets and iframes, and rules for text, copy, and email.

SEO

SEO is a must for any business with a website.
If you are serious about reaching your customers, your site MUST be properly optimized. SEO (search engine optimization) means optimizing your website to maximize it's ranking in organic (free) search listings. Based on keywords and page content, search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing (MSN) decide where to list your website. Carefully crafting your copy and meta data will make your website visible to the most highly qualified customers.

Search Engine Optimization has emerged as the world's fastest-growing and most effective method of advertising and marketing due to its ability to generate new business and increase brand awareness in the most cost effective way.

Following are the basic steps to optimizing a website:

• Site analysis - Check meta data and keywords in your site against the search engines. Research the competition to see what common meta data is used in highly ranked sites. Evaluate meta data and keywords against this information.
  
  
• Keywords, meta tags and page content optimization - Write new meta data and keywords based on the site analysis.
  
  
• Submission to all relevant search engines - If you are a local business, you should list in all local search engines like Yahoo Local.
  
  
• Establish a Google Analytics account - Google Analytics will show you everything about who, how many, how long, and location your of site visitors.
  
  
• Evaluation - monitor and evaluate traffic trends on your site.
  
  
• Tuning and maintenance - This process needs to be ongoing and evolving to keep your site at its best position.
  
  Other Traffic Sources - Sites like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot and others can be an effective way to increase the number of links to your site.

Meta-Tags and Keywords: Talk to the Search Engines

Meta Tags are information that search engines read, but are not visible in the browser. In addition, all textural content of a web page is viewed by search engines as meta data. The most important meta tags are the page title and description. These typically will display as the first two lines of a search result. Not only is it important that they convey something about your product or service that will catch the reader's attention, they must also be carefully chosen to match likely search criteria. Other meta tags can be used to control certain aspects of search engine behavior.

Keywords are information used by some search engines specifically, and by some others indirectly. They can be used to help search engines understand what geographical area your business serves, what products services you offer, and more. Although search engines do not rely as much on keywords as they once did, they are still a valuable tool to improve your visibility.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an extremely useful and FREE tool provided by the good people at Google, so that you can see who is visiting your site, how long, their location, are and more. Here is a screen capture of an overview page:

This easy to understand graphic representation is much better than many ISP stats pages, and all the categories can be expanded for detail information. Setting up Google analytics is a part of a standard site SEO package. Reports are sent to my clients at regular intervals in pdf format.

Important things to remember about page contents.
Some things can improve your search rankings, and some can make them worse . Search engines cannot read all the content on a page. They can read only the text and HTML.

Files like graphics, video and Flash files may show the user lots of good information, but are invisible to the search engines. The use of alt tags on everything will ensure that the content of a graphic or other element is understandable to the search engines.

Overuse or repeated phrases or keywords will cause problems. Search engines are programmed to reject pages that appear to be trying to "game" the system.

Frequent updates improve rankings. Search engines will rank pages with changing content higher than other pages without.

Adding useful or interesting content to social networking sites can also improve the relevancy ranking by search engines when those pages link to your website. Search engines use non-reciprocal links to evaluate the relevancy of your site.