SEO, or Search Engine Optimization opinions have gone through a lot of changes over the last few years. It used to be that I spent a lot of time on strategy, using online tools, extensive linking projects, and many hours reading all the different ideas out there about SEO. There are companies charging a lot of money to move your ranking in Google up one or two spots, and not all of them are bad, but I do believe that way too much time and energy has been put into it.

I speak mostly of Google as they are the most popular search engine, but others are almost the same.  Their purpose has always been to aid in peoples ability to find the information they are looking for quickly and accurately. It used to be that there were ways that you could buck the system and get higher rankings than a similar site by stuffing keywords, or creating similar sites that point to each other, but the great folks at Google have found ways to close up these opportunities and make their search engine is even more accurate. When I say accurate, I mean that they want to deliver the results that make people think “that is exactly what I was looking for.” So, if you are looking for “what makes an airplane fly” you don’t get a website that is selling air sickness pills.

One of the main ways that Google has found to determine this is by watching peoples habits. And though there is a lot of talk about how scary this is that Google is collecting so much information, one of the benefits is that they can develop profiles on websites and see if they are accurately answering peoples search requests. This can be done by looking at how much time people spend on a site, or how many additional links they click on before they find one that finishes their search.

With this in mind, if you put your attention into developing a site that answers people’s questions, in an easy way, and then draws the reader further into your site you will create a solid ranking with Google that wont be swayed by short term tricks. This is the most important thing to spend your time and energy on.

Now, if you have created the ideal site, answering the questions you feel people are looking for, the next most important thing you can look at is how are my search results displayed. Google will first display the page title. Therefore it is important that your page title is catchy. If people are scanning the results, you want yours to jump out at them. In Joomla, your page title is created from the title of your article. So, instead of using ‘About Us’ you may want to try ‘About ABC Widgets’ Google uses the meta description if the search keywords in the title or meta description, and if they keywords are in the text of the page it brings in snippets from that page. So be sure to look at your meta descriptions. In Joomla, there is a default meta description in Global Configuration, and this is what will shop up on all pages that don’t have their own meta description. So, when you create new articles for your site, be sure to fill out the description with something that will catch a persons eye when scanning results, especially on important pages on your site.

If you have completed those two, next you should look at getting inbound links, and not just any inbound links. You will actually loose position if you sign up for what are called links farms, or sites that list many links to all sorts of content. So avoid those emails that say “we want to link to your site,” and then you go look at their site and it has nothing to do with your content. The best inbound links are ones that people will naturally want to follow, because again, Google will be watching. So if you have links floating around on sites, and nobody has ever clicked on them, they are really useless, and maybe even count against you. Whereas links that are on sites that have very similar content to yours, and therefore naturally somebody who is looking for further information would be bound to click on them, these are ideal! One way of finding these sites are to look at the other search results for any given keywords. Look over the other results and think “would this site allow me to add a link?” Blogs have made this work easier, as sometimes you can find an article on a blog that covers a topic related to your website, and you can go and post something as a comment that will allow for a link to your site. A word of warning however, most bloggers do not like posts that are not really content. So don’t post “I really liked what you said” and then hope that the blogger will allow your comment. The blogger may tag you as spam and you wont show up on any blog posts after that as the blogger wont even see your comments. So get into some real discussions with people blogging. Post if you are really interested and have an important item to add.

I think you can see the general ideas here are not about “how do I get better search results” but more about being a genuine contributor to the World Wide Web, not just a opportunist. Create a great website, use the meta description the way it was designed, and get involved in what others are doing in your project areas and soon Google and other search engines will take notice of your organic traffic that is developing and assist by raising your site in the list of results.