The concept of search engine optimization (SEO) has gained a lot of importance due to the success it brings to a website. After all, if you don’t show up on the search engines, your prospects will never find you on the internet...

You may have the best products and services to offer, best performance certifications, and an amazing team of professionals ready to serve your customers. But if you don’t have any business.

So how do search engines work?

I Like Spiders and Bots!
One of the facts about search engines is that they utilize software programs known as bots or spiders that crawl the web and build a database based on their findings. These spiders are sent to view and index pages which are later processed and retrieved from the database. A search engine spider is designed in such a way that it reads any document from top left corner to the bottom right corner as humans do. From this database, programs use algorithms to determine what type of your website you have and how it should be ranked compared to the other websites it has spidered.

Text Links
You can also use these bots to your benefit by allowing them to spider your site completely. You can place text links that direct to some of your main pages on the website at the bottom of your page so that spiders can easily crawl through your site. It is also recommended to have a text link that directs to your site map.

Site Title
The title of your site is very important as it not only serves as a reference for the Internet users who type in the keyword but also it is one of the first things that is viewed by the search engines. You must select the best keywords and place in your title and also make sure that these keywords are relevant to the content on your webpage. In other words, if you have a title about widgets, that page should talk about widgets.

Meta Tag Description
A meta tag description contains a brief description of the webpage content. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Keywords Meta tag. Search engines usually use this as a source of information to know the theme of the site and to aid them in listing and ranking the website. Your meta description may contain two to three sentences with the main keyword placed in the beginning of every sentence. This description appears fully or partially along with your reference link when users search. If a keyword appears in a meta tag, you must have text in the body of your page or risk being blacklisted.

Keyword Usage
Choosing the right keywords to optimize your site is very important. The content on your WebPages should contain the keywords that you are optimizing so that the search engine can easily track your website when a user enters a search query containing your keyword. Using your keywords correctly can help identify your site related to that particular keyword from all other sites on the Internet.

Keyword Rich Content
This is a crucial part of the SEO process as it involves creating compelling text that would make readers remember by linking back to it. Your web page content should be written in such a way that it contains targeted keywords with an ideal keyword density. The content you write must make sense and should be relevant to the person visiting the site. You should also avoid mixing too many themes on a single page. It is also good to know that search engines are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, sounds, flash movies, java script, frames, directories, and similar stuff. Therefore having lots of these on your website may not be very helpful from the SEO point of view.

Anchor Text
Anchor text is hyperlinked text that you can click on. This is used in the content as an internal link that directs visitors to different topics contained in different pages in the website. Keywords that are most relevant and that relate to the overall content of your site should be used in the anchor text as search engines use this to relate your webpage content to the user query.

In summation, to get a favorable listing in search engines, feed your Spiders and Bots!