Search engines can recommend your site to the right people (searchers) by understanding what your site is about. So, how do search engines figure out what your Web site is about?

They read your Web site.

That means that it's up to your Web site to communicate clearly with the search engines to tell them what can be found there, what kind of visitor you're looking for, and how important your site is in the grand scheme of things. This is SEO at it's most basic level.

Let's look at the last item first. Your Web site is the MOST important site on the Internet, as far as you're concerned. So, let's not be sheepish. We want your site to be #1 for all relevant search terms.

Hey Google, Over Here…

Because the amount of new information online is so vast, large search engines like Yahoo! and Google use automated Web crawlers to seek out new Web pages and content.

This system is not fool-proof and often only a home page or a handful of linked pages can be detected by their crawlers. This is usually because the fancy navigation buttons on your site have been created using JavaScript, a tool that is ignored by search bots.

Suggest to your web designer that it is just as important to make it as easy as possible for Web crawlers to detect every page of a Web site as it is to look good.

The best way to do this is by creating a site map. This is essentially a table of contents that contains links to every page on the Web site. Site maps are helpful to readers because they enable them to easily gauge the breadth of information available on a site. More importantly, they allow Web crawlers to easily index every single page of the Web site, which is especially important for large Web sites to make every page visible to Web surfers.

Site maps serve as a very powerful tool to a search engine when it is trying to determine the thematic content of the site. The words used as anchor text for the links sometimes carry a lot of weight. Thus, a specific and well-written site map will ultimately lead to larger search dividends in the long run.

How do they tell who would be interested in your site?

Search engines count the words on your Web site, giving special attention to words in headings, to the words in your page title tags, and to the words in your links.

They also pay attention to the number of other sites that link to yours. The thinking is this: if lots of other sites think you are important enough to link to, then you must be valuable to my searchers.

These are the two primary focuses of an SEO firm: What you put on your site and who is linking to your site.