Optimizing a website is a very different animal than selecting keywords for promoting a site. Where selecting keywords involves a systematic process of searching and identifying the most popular and efficient terms, the optimization process relies more on finesse and creativity.

Finesse resides in the skills of whomever is optimizing a website as he or she uses necessary key terms and keywords while keeping the website content enjoyable.

Creativity resides in how this person uses his or her skills to create new opportunities for improving the optimization of a web page or site.

While finesse impacts the manipulation of visible content, links, naming, etc., creativity touches on all aspects of a website, both visible and within the code.

These are by far the two most important elements that differentiate the great from the mediocre search engine optimization companies and specialists.

Space does not permit us to go into detail about how we handle website optimization, and frankly optimization is unique to each site that we work on. However what we can mention is what goes into a website to make it “shine” in front of a crawler.

1) The Meta Tags have to be complete and perfect. Here is an example:

2) The code must be tight.

Many web pages have codes that run all over the place, with huge empty spaces between lines, broken links, etc. Others use tools to optimize the code, something that actually makes it unreadable to crawlers, let alone humans.

In short, keep your code sharp and easy to read. You will like it in the long run and crawlers will not find a reason to penalize your website.

3) Use all possible parts of your code to insert useful information about your site and business.

For example, tabs, html notes and other items that are present on most websites can and should be used. Note, however, that one should be EXTREMELY careful in using these.

4) Never try to hide anything in your code. This is very dangerous and in all likelihood, the code will be picked up by a crawler and your website will be banned.

5) Use links to and from other websites the way they were supposed to be used: not only for the purpose of getting a higher ranking on Google, but, more importantly, to link to websites that are related to yours and that complement your own services or offerings.

6) Use common sense when optimizing a website. Your primary audience is the visitor who has made the effort to get to your website, not a crawler from Google or Yahoo.

Your visitor should not feel as if you have designed the site for the express purpose of getting a high ranking on a search engine. The content should flow. Lists of services should not be an obvious attempt to spam crawlers, etc. In short, don’t lose sight of your customer.

How can you do all this and avoid the pitfalls of optimization and spamming? There are a number of software and ASP solutions available that will allow you to analyze your website to death. Most of them are relatively good solutions with various degrees of ease of use. However, remember that there is no one solution that works for two websites, so one must take this information with a grain of salt.

Another way to learn what works is to educate yourself. There are many (probably too many) webmaster forums out there offering information on search engine optimization. I do not recommend any in particular but these are the best places to get a sense of what is going on in search engine optimization, what works and what doesn’t work, or to benefit from the experience of others.

Finally, there are companies like ExecFocus.Net. We provide website optimization services to a number of companies that have come to realize that it is not as simple as it sounds to optimize a website. And if your site is going to make money, then you should take this seriously. Considering that you may be competing with millions of websites (do a search on Google and check out how many sites are found in any category - it’s staggering) do you really want to risk it?

For a list of search engines where we will submit your site, click here.

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