ARTICLES FOR WEBMASTERS 
 Why You Need a SEO Specialist?
By Richard McSwain
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is as much an art as a science.
Every major search engine uses its own, closely guarded propriety
algorithm for determining rank and position of the sites it indexes.
SEO is a specialty, and is not necessarily something your web designer
includes as part of the design package. Typically, it is the designer’s
job to produce a site that is functional and aesthetically pleasing
while incorporating the content that you supply. A SEO specialist will
adjust your content to insure it is optimized for readability by search
engines.
Search engines have come a long way since the old days when you could
fill a page with words and achieve a high page ranking because the word
was repeated hundreds of times, or by filling meta tags with unrelated
terms. Today’s search engines are very sophisticated, and give
different weight and importance to different elements on the page. A
SEO specialist will keep up to date with how the major search engines
view the page.
Meta tags consist of text, embedded in the code of the web page, and
not visible to the browser. This is usually the first place that web
designers and site owners go wrong. For instance, if you sell baseball
trading cards, you might think that having baseball and cards listed as
key words in a meta tag would help people find your site. In actuality,
it could hurt your sites ranking, because you would be in competition
against every site that was in any way related to baseball or to cards.
Attracting visitors who are looking for baseball scores or playing
cards will not increase your sales.
Some search engines actually ignore meta tags, instead relying on key
word density and relevance in the body of the page. The density is
determined by how often a word or phrase is repeated, and relevance is
determined by how relevant those words are to the context of the site.
Key word density should be between four to six percent, meaning that if
the text on your site contains one hundred words, your key word
“baseball trading cards” should be repeated five or six times. This is
where the SEO specialist will need to rewrite your content to conform
to this policy.
Relevance is determined by how and where the keywords appear on the
site. If the title of the site is Baseball Trading Cards and you have
the word popcorn repeated ten times in a row, a search engine will
determine that popcorn is not relevant, and disregard it as a key word.
Weight is also given to words that are in a larger or a bold font, and
the search engines look to see how the key words are spread out. Using
“baseball cards” in as many different sentences as possible will give
the term much more weight than having one paragraph that just repeats
the same phrase over and over.
Link backs are another important aspect. The more related sites that
link to yours, the higher index ranking you will receive, but relevance
is again the key. There are link farm services that maintain hundreds
of web sites that do nothing except link back to other sites. Many are
recognized by the search engines and are considered cheating, and can
decrease your site’s index rank. A SEO specialist will assist with
creating relevant links to and from other legitimate sites, and create
blog and social network pages that link to you.
As you can see, there is a lot involved in achieving high search engine
rankings, and there is no magic bullet that will shoot your website to
the top of the search engine list. A SEO specialist will know what the
search engines are looking for, and optimize your site accordingly.
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