By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

You’ve got a website and have been tracking its performance. You have a web analytics solution in place, and you’ve created clearly defined goals that allow you to make sense of all the data at your fingertips. Now that you know what success means for your website, it’s time to take a look at how you can make your website more successful. One way to improve your website’s performance is to optimize it for search engines. The dominant search engine is currently Google, so we’ll be focusing primarily on tactics that work with Google. However, historically, these practices have led to better performance across all search engines.
SEO – What Is It?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of improving the ranking of a website for certain keywords or key phrases on search engines. Keywords or key phrases are the words that a visitor to a search engine types in when they perform a search. The higher you rank in the results that appear for a keyword, the more visitors you will have. SEO isn’t for everyone – some sites want to stay private or members-only. But any site that wants to have more visitors (and that’s most of them), proper SEO is essential.

The key to successful search engine optimization lies in knowing how search engines rank their results. While the exact algorithms that search engines use are closely-guarded secrets which are regularly updated to prevent people from gaming the system, there are many well-known, industry-standard tactics that are universally accepted as best practices in optimizing a website. We’ll focus on a few of those tactics.

Getting Started
Before you can improve your ranking for any keywords, you need to make sure that search engines know about your site in the first place. Search engines regularly send out programs known as crawlers that follow links from one web page to another, reading all the content on those pages. This process is known as indexing a page.

If another site that is already being indexed by a search engine links to your site, then your site will also be indexed, because crawlers will normally follow every link on every page they encounter. But if no one is linking to your site, you may need to submit your site to a search engine. All search engines have pages that allow you to enter your site’s URL and they will begin indexing it.

If your site has a site map, you only need to submit one page that links to that site map. Since the site map will link to every relevant page of your site, the crawler will follow all of its links and index the entirety of your site automatically. This is why a well- thought-out site map is a necessity for an optimized website; otherwise, the crawler may not find all of your content.

If you don’t want certain pages to be indexed, you can prevent a crawler from going to certain pages either by password-protecting them or by using a special file named “robots.txt” to tell them which pages they aren’t allowed to visit. So you can have total control over how your site is indexed. Once a search engine starts indexing your site, you don’t have to worry about resubmitting it if you make any changes in the future. It will keep indexing your site from that point onwards, unless you tell it otherwise.

Optimizing Your Site And Its Content
Once you have submitted your site to a search engine, there are many steps you can take to improve how it ranks and thus drive more visitors to your site. While you can make many of these changes yourself, you can also rely on a company to optimize your site for you (MemberClicks offers a range of SEO options with our web design packages).

Keep in mind that most of these tactics focus on getting results for individual keywords and key phrases. You should have a good idea of what keywords and phrases people would use to look for a site like yours.

The title of a web page is one of the highest-rated factors that search engines use to determine what that page is about. If you have certain keywords that are important to the identity of your site, it’s a good idea to work them into the title of the page. Similarly, the base URL of your website is a very important factor. Most organizations will have a URL that matches their name, but sometimes it’s a good idea to have a URL that matches your most desired keyword or phrase. For instance, if you’re an Atlanta-based bicycle shop, having the URL “atlantabicycles.com” would serve you better than having your name in your URL.

Another important factor is the number of links that link to a page and the text of those links. While you can’t always control how other sites link to you, you can control how you link to pages within your own site. Using your desired keywords or phrases as the text of links to pages about those keywords or phrases will help improve your ranking, as will making sure those links are easy-to-find and repeated throughout the site (in a footer or header navigation and on the site map, for instance).

Though not as important as they used to be, a web page’s meta data, including the meta description tag, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site’s search listings. The meta description tag contains the text you see after a link in the search results, so it’s particularly important for attracting visitors.

What To Avoid
In choosing a service to optimize your site, you need to be careful. In general, any service that promises to get you to the top of the search results for a particular phrase should not be trusted – they are likely using what are known as “black hat” tactics. These are practices that exploit weaknesses in the search engine algorithms, allowing a website to rank highly for keywords about which it may not even have any content.

One powerful black hat tactic is the use of “link farms.” These are networks of sites that serve no purpose other than to attract search engine crawlers. By establishing a network of hundreds of links, they can force content to the top of the results page by sheer number of links alone.

Another tactic to avoid is “keyword stuffing,” or putting a large number of unrelated keywords on a page in the hopes of drawing traffic. Hiding keywords by moving them off-screen or making them the same color as their backgrounds are similarly frowned-upon tactics. If a search engine catches a site using these tactics, they will often ban the site, sometimes permanently. Since search engines drive nearly all traffic to the web, this is a kiss of death for most sites. And search engines have gotten very good at finding these tactics.

What Comes Next?
Once you’ve optimized your site, you’ll want to monitor it using your analytics solution to see how it’s performing. By checking to see what keywords people use to reach your site, you can continue further optimizing your site by shaping it around those keywords. After that, there are many avenues you can explore to drive more traffic your way – paid advertising and further optimization.