Optimizing Your Site for Search Engines

Search engine optimization is a lot like trying to catch the steam that you
breathe on a cold winter day. You can see it. You know it exists, but there’s
no way to actually contain and quantify the steam. You can see the results
of SEO and you can figure out how best to achieve it, but it’s still possible to
do everything right and not achieve the ultimate goal — landing the very first
listing on a search engine results page, or SERP.
Good news though, you don’t necessarily want to be the very top listing on a
SERP. Think about this — how often do you click the first search result and
not go any farther? Even if you find exactly what you’re looking for on the
first page you jump to, you still click through some of the other results just
to make sure the first page isn’t lying to you.
As a general rule, I go through the listings of about ten results pages, just to
make sure I’m getting the best info. Admittedly, I may be a little more patient
than your average searcher. Most people don’t go much deeper than the
second page of results. Because you should probably be targeting your Web
site to normal folks rather than obsessive-compulsive types like me, you want
your Web site to fall somewhere on the first or second page of results. If it
does, you’re fine — you can count your search marketing efforts a success,
even if your site isn’t at the very tippy-top of the first SERP.
Achieving that first- or second-page placement isn’t a sure thing — it requires
a little effort on your part. You can take a number of steps to ensure a better
search engine ranking — steps I get to in a bit — but the most important
piece in your SEO puzzle involves the keywords on which your Web site is
based. You do have keywords, right? If not, you need them. However, not just
any keyword will do, which the next section makes clear.