Search Engine Optimization FAQ

What is search enging optimization?

Answer: This is a practice of following guidelines that would allow your website to be ranked higher compared to other competitive sites in search engine searches by your online visitors. You can design your site to target specific search terms and phrases that best match the products and services that your company provides. This is called search engine optimization.

What is a META tag?

Answer: Your HTML pages that form your website have a few tags at the top of the page that describe briefly what the webpage is and what content it includes. Below we have provided the main tags:

1) TITLE tag;

2) KEYWORDS tag;

3) DESCRIPTION tag; and

4) CONTENT tag.

Each of these should be used to correspond to the search term or phrase you are targeting, e.g. if you are targeting Tacoma Landscaping, your tags may look something like this:

<title>Tacoma Landscaping| Gardening Landscaping Tacoma Washington Area</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Tacoma Landscaping and Gardening Services" />
<meta name="KeyWords" content="tacoma, landscaping, gardening, flowers, plants " />
<meta content="USA" name="country" />
<meta content="Tacoma; USA" name="location" />

What is the TITLE tag?

Answer: Web pages that form your website are HTML based pages that each have a TITLE. This is a very important tag because most search engines regard this tag as important description of the webpage and as a result this affects your search ranking. Ideally, you want to keep it brief and relevant to the content of the page that it represents. Avoid words that are not relevant and include words that are targeting for your search terms and phrases.

What is the best quantity of search terms and phrases each webpage should include?

Answer: Ideally, you may want to only target no more than one search term or phrase per page and dedicated the content to that single search term. If after a few month you discover that you cannot compete with your client on that particular search term, then expand on it, i.e. make the phrase more unique, for instance, if "General Dentist" does not give you high page ranking, then may be you can target, "General Family Dentist", and again, if still you are not ranked high, then you can continue with, "Denver General Family Dentist", etc.

What are the best design concepts for search engine optimized web pages?

Answer: Once you have a search term or phrase that you are targeting, you want to repeat that phrase in the first paragraph and depending on the length of your content, a few times throughout your page. However, please avoid repeating the term again and again in every paragraph. Firstly because it does not help your online visitor and makes the content somewhat unreadable, AND you will be penalized by the search engines if you mindlessly repeat the terms all over the webpage without any relevance or common sense.

Why is analysing the site log reports important?

Answer: Because it helps you improve your return-on-investment. Basically, if you know what part of your website is generating most of your traffic, you can reduce your costs in areas where you are not producing results and focus more of your effort and your budget to successful traffic generating web pages and search phrases. Also, if you know what search terms are not bringing you traffic you can modify them or try new one altogether for more traffic. Once you improve your traffic your can start to devote more time and resources to improving sales conversion ratio (convert more of your traffic into sales).

Do Javascripts, Flash, and Frames cause any problems with the search engine indexing?

Answer: Well, search engines generally do not like these and some ignore them completely and others have technical problems when it comes to Frames. If you can avoid Frames, you will be better off. Flash is not read (or understood) by search engine crawlers and excessive Javascripts also is not recommended.

Cascading Style Sheet, good idea or bad idea?

Answer: Actually CSS files are ideal and clean up your HTML page and also organize it so that you can manage and maintain your site and your web pages easier in the future. They are search engine friendly.

What search engines and directories are most important for search engine registration?

Answer: You should at a minimum submit to Google, MSN, and Yahoo search engines and DMOZ directory. Manual submission are most effective and often automated search engine registration are not worth the time you waste even reading about them.

Is there anything I should avoid doing that will harm my search engine optimization?

Answer: YES. You want to avoid anything that will cause your website to be banned from search engines and at the least penalize your page rank. These include, cloaking pages, Spamdexing, doorway pages and sites, and generally trying to break the rules. See our Guideline section for more details.