One of the most common misconceptions about SEO is that it is implemented after a web site has been built. It can be, but it’s much harder to be successful when your site isn’t built on a solid SEO foundation. A better option is to consider SEO before you begin to build your web site, if that’s possible. It may not be; but if that’s the case, you can still implement SEO strategies in the design of your site — it will just require a lot more work than building it in at the beginning.
Know your target
Before you even start contemplating how to build your web site, you should know in what types of search engines it’s most important for your site to be ranked. Search engines are divided into several types beyond the primary, secondary, and targeted search engines. Search engine types are also determined by how information is entered into the index or catalog that’s used to return search results. The three types of search engines are as follows:
- Crawler-based engines: Up until this point, the search engines discussed fall largely into this category. A crawler-based search engine (such as Google) uses an automated software agent (called a crawler) to visit, read, and index web sites. All the information collected by the crawler is returned to a central repository—a process called indexing. It is from this index that search engine results are pulled. Crawler-based search engines revisit web pages periodically in a time frame determined by the search engine administrator.
- Human-powered engines: Human-powered search engines rely on people to submit the information that is indexed and later returned as search results. Sometimes human-powered search engines are called directories. Yahoo! is a good example of what, at one time, was a human-powered search engine. Yahoo! started as a favorites list belonging to two people who needed an easier way to share their favorite web sites. Over time, Yahoo! took on a life of its own. It’s no longer completely human controlled. Newer search engines such as Mahalo and Cuil are entirely human powered, however, and this is creating a buzz on the Web. Human-powered search engines add an element of personalization to search that fits in with the current social nature of the Web.
- Hybrid engines: A hybrid search engine, as you might guess, is not entirely populated by a web crawler or by human submission. It is a combination of the two. In a hybrid engine, people can manually submit their web sites for inclusion in search results, but there is also a web crawler that monitors the Web for sites to include. Many search engines today fall into the hybrid category to at least some degree. Although the majority are populated mostly by crawlers, others offer some method by which people can enter their web site information.
It’s important to understand these distinctions because how your site ends up indexed by a search engine may have some bearing on when it is indexed. For example, fully automated search engines that use web crawlers might index your site weeks (or even months) before a human powered search engine. The reason is obvious: The web crawler is an automated application. The human-powered search engine may actually require that all entries be reviewed for accuracy before a site is included in search results, and that takes time.
In any case, the accuracy of search engine results varies according to the search query that is used. For example, entries in a human-powered search engine might be more technically accurate, but the search query that is used will determine whether the desired results are returned.
Page elements
Another facet of SEO to consider before you build your web site is the elements needed to ensure that your site is properly indexed by a search engine. Each search engine places different importance on different page elements. For example, Google is a very keyword-driven search engine, but it also looks at site popularity and the tags and links on any given page.
How well your site performs in a search engine is determined by how the elements of your page meet the engine’s search criteria. Every search engine looks for the following main criteria:
Text
Text is one of the most important elements of any web site. Of particular importance are the keywords within the text on a page, where those keywords appear, and how often they appear. This is why keyword marketing has become such a large industry in a relatively short time. Your keywords make all the difference when a search engine indexes your site and then serves it up in search results.
Tags
In search engine optimization, two kinds of tags are important on your web site: meta tags and HTML tags. Technically, meta tags are HTML tags; they just appear in very specific places. The two most important meta tags are the keyword tag and the description tag.
Links
To be of value, the links on your web pages must be related to the content of the page, and they must be active links to real web sites. Broken links can lower your search engine ranking. Links have always been an important factor in how web sites rank on the Web, but the abuse of linking that we see so often today started just a few years ago, about the time that Google became the big name in search.
Popularity
One other consideration, even before you build your site, is the site’s popularity. Many search engines include a criterion for the number of times users click on web sites that are returned in search results. The more often the site is selected from the search results, the higher in the ranking it climbs.