When I first set up my web store, I began receiving daily spam as well. Not the typical spam that the average internet user gets, but all sorts of solicitation from businesses that do nothing except offer to optimize your web page for search engines-for a price. While these businesses definitely have their place, for the home based business owner on a budget, these services are likely too costly, although they will save the owner some time. So we need to learn how to get our businesses seen, without having to pay a fortune for it.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO sounds complicated right? Not really. Getting traffic to your site starts with understanding how search engines work. At least I think it is important to understand how they work, hence why I am writing this! A potential customer, let’s call her Jane, is looking for a Widget. That’s what you sell…widgets. So she goes to her favorite search engine and types in “widget.” So how does Jane’s favorite search engine decide which sites to show her?
There are slight differences in how different search engines work, which is why you get different results from different search engines. All search engines do three basic things though. They search the internet for content, based on important words, the keywords you enter into the search engine. They keep an index of keywords they find, and where they find them, and they allow users to search for words or phrases within that index.
A search engine begins by sending out what are called “spiders” to build lists of the words found on websites. This process is called “web crawling.” It starts with popular servers and sites, builds lists of the words on those servers and sites, and then searches other pages for those words, and visits every link on that site. It’s pretty easy to form a mental image from here of a spider making a web–we ARE talking about the World Wide WEB here ;). Some engines place special importance on the words used in the page titles, subtitles, and Meta tags. Some will ignore words like “a, an, the” etc. Some will keep track of the most frequently used words on a page. On a side note, which I will discuss more later, a Meta tags are information that is inserted into the header of a page. This information often gives the “spider” instructions, so to speak.
So, the search engines take all of this indexed information, and compile it into a list of results, which it returns to the user who entered the keywords or phrase into the engine. This is a simplified description, but it works for this purpose. So, if you want your page(s) seen, you need to make sure that the spiders pick up on the keywords your site is related to. Easy enough, just build a page that has the keywords all over it right? Wrong. If Jane searches for “widgets” and a search engine sees a page that says “widgets” ALL over it, it might just throw the result out, considering it a spam page or something else.
In upcoming blogs, I will discuss how to effectively insert keywords, tags, and various other ways to get your site out there.