Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO is key to a website’s success, particularly a new and/or relatively small one. It is the process of structuring the site so that automated programs, or crawlers, sent out by search engines, are able to find the site, and then rank it on the given engine according to the relevancy of the site to the topic one is searching for. This requires a number of tasks to be done: making sure certain keywords are featured regularly in the text, so that people searching for a topic can more easily determine if it’s relevant to their interests, structuring the site towards text and providing captions and transcripts for pictures and videos, and coding the site so that it is intuitive and easy to read. Although much of it may sound arcane at first, much of it is very common-sense and easy to understand upon further inspection.

Keywords

The basis of SEO are keywords, certain words of phrases that people search on search engines for. To begin devising keywords that would enable users to find a website easier, begin with creating a series of categories relevant to the goal of the site (e.g. succulents, air plants, care, etc). These are not necessarily the keywords that will be used in the site. Rather, these are the categories of keywords that we will devise. We will then begin to devise the actual keywords that will belong in each category. Once keywords are created, there is the matter of integrating them into the main website itself. One cannot simply repeat, for example, “types of succulents” over and over again; the crawlers index items by context as well. To best use keywords in a manner that will be ranked highly by crawlers, one must integrate it meaningfully in a text, repeating it but not too often (e.g. “you may be looking for different types of succulents. These succulent types are recommended for beginners...”)

Search Engine Crawlers

The other key to optimising a website for search engines is to actually structure a website so that it’s friendly to search engine crawlers, automated scripts that browse websites to provide data for search engines. Crawlers generally behave like a human user browsing a website, save for the fact that they do not “see” images or videos, nor can they use search engines themselves. To optimise a website for search engine crawlers, it is important to provide them with text so that they can “see” the website better. One can still have pictures on their site, but providing them with ‘alt-texts’, caption-like text that appears when one places their cursor over them. One may also provide transcripts for videos or recordings. It’s also important to cross-link as frequently as possible. As crawlers do not use search engines, they cannot access what isn’t linked to anything else. This means putting up indices and site maps to easily navigate the site to, adding tags to articles, and generally cross-referencing pages with each other so that users can visit them once they’re done reading a given article.

Tags and URLs

Finally, even the coding and markup of a given website is essential to proper Search Engine Optimisation. We will primarily be looking at tags and URLs. Tags in the context of SEO refer to HTML tags. Title tags are the tags that determine how the page will show up in a source engine. Ideally, Title Tags should be no longer than 70 characters and include at least some of the keywords relevant to the page, ideally at the beginning of the title. Meta-Descriptions are tags that describe the website for the benefit of search engines, so users will know what the site is about. URLs, like title tags, should be as readable as possible for the benefit of site visitors and crawlers, with as many keywords used as common sense permits, as opposed to random chains of characters. Ultimately, success in using these markups depends on using them to make the page as readable and accessible to potential visitors as possible.

In Conclusion

Ultimately, much of Search Engine Optimisation depends on common sense and thinking of how an average reader of the page would try and navigate the site. To make a website friendly to search engine crawlers that may rank higher effectively depends on making it as clear, intuitive to read and easy to navigate as possible, as crawlers behave in many ways not so different from a human reader. They navigate the page, scanning for any evidence that may indicate that the page is relevant to their interests, and want to have the minimum difficulty in trying to navigate a web-page. Thus, applying the concepts of Search Engine Optimisation and thinking what would make a site rank high on a search engine rests on making a page friendly to the readers, and in doing so everyone benefits: the webmasters, the readers, and so forth.

Sources

"SEO: The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization from Moz." Moz. March 04, 2014. Accessed February 08, 2018. https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.

Leist, Rachel. "How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner's Guide." HubSpot Blog. Accessed February 08, 2018. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-do-keyword-research-ht.

"What is Search Engine Crawler? - Define Search Engine Crawler." Brick Marketing - SEO Marketing Solutions Company. Accessed February 08, 2018. http://www.brickmarketing.com/define-search-engine-crawler.htm.

Fishkin, Rand. "15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs." Moz. August 07, 2017. Accessed February 08, 2018. https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls."

On-Site SEO." Moz. Accessed February 08, 2018. https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-site.