Optimizing web pages for search engines
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The process of optimizing web pages for search engines requires that the website designer and copy writers have a blend of search engine knowledge, patience, persistence, and plain old good luck. Each search engine will view a web page differently according to their rules (the mathematical algorithm) for relevancy. Relevancy is a determination made by the search engine software that your page is an important resource for a keyword or keywords. A measure of success for optimizing web pages is the 50/50 rule – 50% of the major search engines list us in the top 50 results for our preferred keywords. But hold on to that thought, there are a number of roadblocks to achieving that success ratio.

Search engine optimization of web pages requires a delicate blend of website text design elements that will present your site as a good candidate for relevancy with the different search engines. Achieving this blend may require experimental adjustments periodically. It is not uncommon for a website to achieve good placement, then have a few minor changes to the website text cause it to lose that position. This does not mean we shouldn’t make changes to our website but a major redesign or significant changes in the text may cause us to start over from scratch with optimization.

There are a few key elements of website text design that are essential in varying degrees to all search engines. Remember that the search engine crawler only can index text for relevancy; graphics cannot be read by the crawler although the graphic filename and an alt tag that describes the image can be indexed. Many search services, such as Google, provide an image search.
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