Search Engine Optimization Demystified

Appealing, informative, easy to navigate, up-to-date and easily found. Your website tells the world who you are. The question is, how do they find you in the world wide web? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way of structuring a web page so the search engines recognize and collect the most important information on the page. Search engine optimization increases traffic to your website by improving your search engine ranking. A high ranking means your site will be one of the first results displayed after a search engine query. The optimizing process involves analyzing and editing website content and meta tags.

Search engines send out "spiders" to gather information for indexing in their information databases. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo use algorithms to query their database to find valid and relevant information.

The first SEO step includes study, research and analysis. Once the research phase is complete, the website content and meta tags are then edited and the website is resubmitted to major search engines. This puts the website in a queue to be "crawled" or checked by search engine spiders, which index the website’s content into the search engine database.

TaylorMack can help your website rankings improve with search engine optimization.

Glossary of Search Engine Terminology

Meta tag: HTML tags are placed behind the scenes in the “head” section of a web page. These tags are used to help search engines categorize the page properly. A few important meta tags include title, description and keywords.

- The title is one of the most important meta tags, which is a brief description of your website. It is displayed in the browser.

- Description is one sentence which sums up the page.

- Keywords are a listing of words relevant to the web site content.

Search engine: An internet tool for finding information.
A search engine uses spiders to index or organize information into a database. Search software uses algorithms to retrieve relevant information. Google, Yahoo and Ask are a few of the sites with search engines.

Spider: Software that scans documents on the web for content to add to an index or catalog of information.