I love web traffic. There’s nothing like getting free hits from Google, MSN or Yahoo just because your web site’s content has content matching a user’s query. Just today I realized that this site now ranks for the hugely competitive (hah) “mint hot chocolate” query at Google. While that query won’t make me rich — and nor will this website 
— it does show that clean on-target content still achieves natural traffic even without incoming links.
So what’s this search engine optimization thing? Well, it’s actually a really deep and complicated field of study. Lots of people spend their whole work life trying to rank highly in Google’s search results for competitive terms.
At its core, SEO is all about making a URL come up early in the search engine result pages (SERPs). To rank a page in SERPs a search engine will take into account the page contents including title, headings, text and overall structure as well as the website surrounding it. It also takes into account the authority of a website. Authority is simply defined as the quality and quantity of links to the site. Some links are worth more to a site’s authority, some are worth far less or are possibly negative. The general idea is that when good quality sites link to another site they provide a credible ‘vote’ for the linked site. This is sort of the same idea as Colin Powell throwing his support behind Barack Obama near the end of the US Presidential Election. Credible sources are thought to ‘vote’ for other credible sources through a link, and thus bring up their authority.
So what’s a newbie to do?
First, do some more reading. Site structure and on-page optimization should be the first step toward ranking a page for a keyword. Currently important structural things are a good <title> with the keyword early in the title, a good filename like keyword-phrase.html, relevant header tags (<h1> <h2> and so on) and coherent, quality on-page text. And, you have to make sure the search engine can find this page from your other pages, so it needs an incoming link, preferably with its keyword in the link.
Check out Google’s SEO Starter Guide
Next, if your page content is quality and worthy of links from other people, publicize it. That might mean emailing your partners, vendors, other related websites and so on to ask them to give your new page a read, and if it’s valuable to their website visitors, a link hopefully.
Too much work for you? Then hire a qualified person or company to handle it for you. Search engines are how most people find things on the Internet these days. Quality SEO is nearly always a positive ROI investment in my experience.
I’ll talk a bit more about SEO in future posts hopefully, and possibly a bit about the white-hat vs. black-hat SEO strategies.
