Search Engine Optimisation - Checklist

How search engines work with a checklist of optimisation criteria - a brief summary.

How Search Engines Work

The majority of visitors to your web site will come from web search engines such as Google. Knowing how search engines work can make all the difference in the number of visitors your web site will receive and the profitability of your online business.

Web Crawler,or Spider
Search engines operate by using an automated program, called a web crawler, or web spider, to search for web pages on the World Wide Web (WWW). The crawler creates copies of the pages retrieved for later processing by the search engine. Each web page is subsequently analysed and added to an index database for use in the search engines' results.

Key Words
The words that you type into a search box are seen as 'key words' by the search engine. After checking its index database for similar key words, the search engine responds to your query by providing a listing of matching results.

Ranking of Results
Because there can be millions of results that match your key words, the search engine tries to display the most relevant, best matching, best quality results first.

The order, or rank, in which the results are listed is usually determined by a set of rules, or algorithm, which the search engines use to determines a numerical score of relevance. The higher the score, the higher the relevance and the higher you web page will appear in the listing of results.

Checklist of Search Engine Optimisation Criteria

A knowledge of search engine evaluation and quality criteria, and how it discriminates between competing web pages can be used to optimise web pages to improve their relevancy, hence ranking, in response to a users specific query.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) starts at the web page design stage and may continue to help improve page rank. SEO is also used to respond to the evolution of the web and changes to search engine algorithms.

A checklist of areas to be considered when optimising a web page for search engines include:

Domain name.
Page title.
Page description.
Relevancy of page content.
Quality and uniqueness of page content.
Page layout and design.
Important keyword content at top of page.
Correct use of keywords in the page title, description and main body text.
Correct use of meta tags for title, description and keywords.
Correct keyword density of a page.
Correct use of image 'alt' tags.
Use of keywords in URL.
Keyword filenames.
Use of headings (H1, H2 etc) for word weightings.
Navigation links in html, as opposed to image only, or Java script.
Links and linking, quality of inbound links.
Magnitude of peer web site approval.
Geographic location.
Website maturity.
Keyword filenames.
Use of validated code in conformance to W3C.
Cross browser compatibility.
Fast loading web pages.
Amount of HTML - versus - text content
Use of cascading style sheets.

The above checklist is just a fraction of the criteria used by search engines to rank web pages. However, the list does show many of the important criteria that relates to what you have to sell. Together with your website designer, you can make a significant contribution towards raising the position of your web site in search engine results.