Mosaic Globe Studio

We all know the importance of having our site rank high with specific words and phrases in the major search engines. But how search engines find and index your site can be a mystery. A mystery that a number of companies are ready to cash in on. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very specialized segment of marketing that is often abused. If you have been the point person for your organizations website you have probably already heard these claims:  "Page 1 ranking GUARANTEED!"  or "submissions to over 300 search engines".  

While most SEO consultants out there is aren't charlatans; it is best to steer clear of those making these claims. The promise of quick results and double the site traffic overnight may seem appealing, but how you obtain these results may get your site into trouble. Looking for shortcuts often means finding ways to trick the search engine in your favor. Major search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, AltaVista and the others are relentlessly changing their ranking algorithms. One reason for this is to outsmart those looking to unfairly influence the results.

Google has a controlling share of the search market because it's results are considered the most accurate; and Google intends to keep it that way. A good marketing campaign should take advantage of every trick at its disposal ; However, a reckless SEO strategy can get your site removed from the search engine database all together.

Their are two ways to achieve good placement in search engine results. The first is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Select the keywords that you want visitors to find your site with, and then set a price for those keywords. Say $0.35 per click. You pay $0.35 each time a visitor clicks on your link and if you bid is high enough, you'll be on the first page, or even the first link. This method is best when you need a quick boost of qualified leads, or to absolutely insure that your in the mix for a given keyword or phrase.

However, for better long term results a company should expend some effort in an organic (or natural)SEO strategy. Although it takes longer to achieve; the resulting increase of traffic will be steady (as opposed to PPC campaign spikes) with well targeted visitors; and will cost much less than a PPC campaign bringing in the same number of visitors.

To achieve your SEO goals it helps to understand how search engines work.

Search Engines and Spiders
How do Search engines find your site? A search engine will come across your site either from a link to it or by you submitting your site directly. The search engine will then dispatch it's spiders (or Bot) to crawl through the content of your site. This spider actually reads all of your content and makes a distinction between regular text and text given more importance such as site titles, page titles and bolded copy.

This information is sent back to the central database where it is indexed (This process can take weeks and sometime months). Search Engine spiders will repeat this process at regular intervals. Once your content is stored in a search engines database, the search engine runs a series of algorithms against the content. This mathematical formula is a closely guarded secret and is different for each search engine. But what it is doing is looking for those words on your MosaicGlobe site that are given more importance. In general, the key is word density, or how often a word or phrase is used in relation to the total amount of text.

In addition to the content, the search engines look at what other sites are linking to yours. This would seem to be a popularity contest of sorts. The more pages that link to your site the more important your site must be. Included in the linking category is how many links are coming from within your own site. For example, A search engine will find that your main page is more important if there is more than one link pointing to it from within your own site.

Optimizing Tips
In the past, search engines used hidden tags called Meta Tags to help index your site. However, this method was abused by webmasters desperate for ranking and has for the most part been abandoned. The same goes for the 'Alt' attribute. The 'Alt' attribute is used within Image tags to give an 'Alternative' description to site images. Search engines give very little value to these tags. However, they are very important if you are concerned with accessibility.

Spiders in general, love text rich pages and good page structure. A search engine friendly site is built with a solid HTML foundation (They dislike hidden content, content wrapped in javascript, Lots of tables, mouse-overs, flash files, PDF content and Audio files). Much like us, spiders like to find the most important information at the top of a page, and the page headers should relate to the content they are reading.

Conclusion
Your MosaicGlobe website is built with SEO in mind. But the content and popularity parts of the equation may need some more work. Create lots of descriptive text content -- a blog is a great way to build spider rich content. Be sure to give some thought to your content: Identify the words that you would like people to find your site with and use them. If they are words that people will actually type into a search engine then those are the words to use. Then start getting your site linked. That may seem difficult at first, but it's also a good way to meet other people with your interests!  Of course you can always call us for help with all of this...