If you know what the letters SEO stand for, you understand the title of this post! If you’re new to SEO, hopefully I can demystify it a bit for you.

SEO, search engine optimization, is a term used to encompass a number of strategies designed to improve your ranking in search engines. By ranking, I am referring to the position your website holds in the organic search results. Organic search results are the items in the main body of the search engine results page. On Google, for example, the top three results on the page, and the results in the right-hand column are all paid placements. The results below the top three are considered ‘organic’.

My SEO Work

For apexwinecellars.com, a site I both designed and implemented SEO for, I have achieved not only front page ranking in Google – the search engine that matters, but currently sit at the #2 spot in organic results for the primary keyword of “custom wine cellar“.  At the time I originally wrote this article, Apex occupied the #1 spot, but as I reference below, SEO is constantly evolving.

Apex is a company with branch locations across the United States and is also represented internationally, so I had to have a strategy that was both global and local – a challenge indeed.

I implemented two specific strategies to improve localized results in areas Apex has a brick and mortar presence. As a result, Apex is listed within the top five results for each state where Apex has a branch office and in some cases more than once. Achieving first page ranking at all took several months after I began applying a concerted strategy and the current rankings have taken longer.

Why does it take so long?

The algorithms used by each search engine to determine site ranking all vary considerably and are all highly proprietary but do contain similar traits that can be leveraged to improve your ranking. These traits are the foundation of SEO practices today.

These practices alone cannot ensure ranking - in fact, nothing really can.

I say this because there are always elements of a given search engine’s ranking algorithm that are unknown to the public and despite the subculture of SEO fanatics who monitor and analyze the search engines, only so much is known about what makes any given site rank higher than another. I provide this explanation as a caveat to those expecting a ‘magic bullet’ or who have been sold a ‘magic bullet’ by an SEO firm.

SEO Fundamentals

Some primary factors influencing your site’s ranking are:

• Content/Design
  • standards: sites failing to meet XHTML or CSS compliance may not be fully indexed if spiders encounter errors
  • amount: more content to index is good, but done improperly, you risk having your content disregarded as non-relevant and your ranking ruined.
  • age: new content ranks higher and is a good draw for returning visits
  • links: links receive additional attention and should be carefully constructed to reflect your keyword strategy
  • meta tags: less important than they used to be, but still a basic item sites should have
  • page names: page names matter in ranking and search engines treat hyphens and underscores differently
  • document types: content viewed by the search engine as not being dynamically created will rank better
• Key Words
  • research: what are people actually searching by in your industry vs what you think are your key words
  • selection: what phrases are effective and discriminatory for your vertical niche
  • implement: inclusion in your meta tags, links and content
• External Links
  • number of links:the more times search engines find your domain referred to in other places on the world wide web, the better
  • ranking of referring sites: a few high ranked sites referring to yours will outweigh hundreds of low-ranked site referrals

This is obviously only an outline and much more could be said about it – hence the scores of books written about SEO strategies, but it provides a basic outline for how I approach SEO.

(Originally published at http://johnkauffman.info)

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