The Pacablogger

Google envy is an ugly thing.

Have you ever googled your farm name? What about searching by keywords that you think someone might use to find you? Were you happy with how high up you were in the search results?

I’m sure you’ve gotten the emails and advertisements offering Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services, some of which guarantee a front page or even top ten ranking when certain searches are initiated. The truth is, there’s a lot you can do on your own with your web developer. The key is to understand how search engines work and what improvements you can make to your website to optimize your ranking.

For the purposes of this post, we’ll use Google for our search engine. Google is the only search engine you really need to be concerned with. Their usage exceeds every other search engine, including Yahoo! and Bing. The percentage of searches that are done on Google exceed 70%! So let’s say someone types in some keywords into Google. Google processes the query through a constantly evolving algorithm leveraging the database in their index servers to rapidly serve up the results back to the end user. The index server is a database that accelerates the search process. It contains all the unique pages on all the websites and URL’s that Google knows about through periodic exploration with Googlebots or web spiders. If your website page does not exist in Google’s index, it cannot be found by Google, and therefore cannot be included in any query results. It’s easy to check. Just enter your URL into the search field in Google.

We may not know how each search engine’s algorithm ranks results, but we do know the components that are considered. These are:

1. Keyword Density/Content of the webpage
2. Platform and structure of site
3. Quality of links
4. Meta tags
5. Site Registration

When search engines first started, searches were based heavily on meta tags. Meta tags are used in HTML to describe the metadata (data about data) on a website or page. The meta elements that are used in SEO are primarily the keywords, description, language, and robots attributes. However, as websites were developed to deliberately manipulate search engines for higher rankings, keyword stuffing led to the decreased or even eliminated use of metatags by search engine algorithms. That is why webpage content and keyword density has risen to become the number one most important component for SEO.

Next up: SEO for Alpaca Breeders Part II:The Components of SEO

Information Sources:

• SEO Presentation at August 8, 2009 ABR Meeting by LaSheita Sayer, Chief Marketing Officer/Founder of ZoZo Marketing Group, L.L.C.
• How to Understand Search Engine Optimization on eHow.com