Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is defined by wikipedia as "the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion." To increase your SEO for google organically, unique and accurate page titles are required. The example that google gives of a good title is one that includes the business name and three main focus areas of the website. Google recommends to accurately describe your page's content, create unique title tags for each page, and use brief, but descriptive titles. Another aspect that google's bots check for on your sites content are your meta tags. Meta tags "gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about." Meta tags are longer then the pages title, and they are what google often uses as the snippet description of your website. Google recommends overall good coding, including having good anchor text, appropriate headings, optimizing use of your images, and using robots.txt effectively.
All of this information is extremely important to how I am going to code my websites in the future. It is essential that I code my websites using methods that will be good for search engine optimization so that there will be a lot of traffic drawn to my site. Some other ways to promote your site, besides for having good code is by paying to advertise. A very effective program is using google adwords. Google adwords is a program where google uses keywords that you give them for your site, and puts your website at the top and side bars of a search listing. Google charges you a set rate for each key word that is used, the rate varies, the price increases for more popular key words. Some other advertising that is very effective is advertising on social networking sites. The most popular social networking site is facebook, and advertising on facebook may be the most effective method to draw traffic to your website. A good article about this is http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/business/media/14digi.html. That article tells about how large advertising companies such as procter and gamble are using sites such as facebook as ways to advertise. Another good article about advertising on social networking sites is http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/10/social-network-advertising-annoying-effective.html. That articles tells about a study that shows that "1006 people with broadband access who spent at least $200 online in the past year, used a community site such as MySpace and consumed or made some type of digital media including videos and music." That information is very valuable as a website designer, and possible ebussiness owner because it is good evidence that it is essential to spend money advertising on social networking sites to maximize the traffic that is drawn to your site. Even though it is vital and essential to have good back-end coding of your website, there is no getting around advertising.