From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

One of the least expensive and most effective ways to boost your market these days is through search engine optimization (SEO). SEO involves using a few basic tricks to make it easier for search engines like Google and Yahoo! to find you and elevate your site in their search results.  SEO should be a check-off item for any business; however, a lot of people barely even know what is.  Here are some basics.

It helps to understand first why SEO is important.  When people search on terms that are relevant to your business, they’re demonstrating an active interest in something you sell.  What better way to identify prospects them by popping up on their screens at exactly the moment they express interest in your product or service?

We’ll use Google as an example, but all major search engines use the same basic tactics these days. Google’s search results algorithm is called PageRank. It’s proprietary, but some basics are understood about it.  For one thing, it looks hard at page titles, which are the labels that appear in the upper left corner of your browser. The more specific the title, the better PageRank likes it. This means that, all other things being equal, a webpage titled “All About Bowling Balls” will perform better on a query about bowling balls than one titled “Resources for the Avid Bowler,” even if both pages have exactly the same content.

This importance of page titles is one of the reasons blogging can be so effective for your business. Most blog software uses the title of an individual blog posting as the page title, and blogs are collections of individual pages.  This means that if you are careful to label your entries appropriately, you can move very high in the rankings very fast. If you work in a very focused field –  nanotubes, for example – and you know your customers are searching on that term a lot, you should be sure to include “nanotubes” in as many page titles as possible.

Google also gives priority to pages that it believes to be explanatory or educational in nature over product listing pages. This is why your online catalog may perform very poorly in search results, while an article about how to use your product may do quite well.  Keep this in mind when developing site content.  A nice collection of “how to“ articles will serve you well, helping to drive traffic to your product pages.

Perhaps the best known innovation in Google is link popularity. All major search engines now use this technique in somewhat different forms. This proprietary and frequently changing algorithm assigns extra weight to pages that are linked to by a lot of other pages. Link popularlity is an imperfect formula that lends itself to manipulation (a Googlebomb is one of the more creative exploits) and constantly changed by the search engine companies for that reason.

Nevertheless, some basic principles are common. A page that is linked to by many other pages in different domains (links within a domain aren’t counted) will rise in the rankings above a page with fewer inbound links. The quality of the link is important: spam blogs are bogus sites set up specifically to influence link popularity rankings. Search engines are learning to quickly filter out this junk. Your best bet is always to post something that people in your field will find valuable, and then alert other site owners to it and ask for a link. The new breed of blog search engines like Technorati rely heavily metric as an indication of a blog’s popularity.

Finally, you can improve your site’s search ranking bt commenting on blogs, support forums and newsgroups. Search engines routinely index these busy venues and pick up on keywords or URLs that appear there. If your people are busy contributing to the community in which they work, the benefits will come back to you.

A note of caution: There are many shady operators who will promise to optimize your site through tactics like spam blogs, link farms and comment spam. Avoid these shysters. Not only are their tactics disruptive and annoying, but search engine providers often blacklist businesses that employ these devious tactics. Keep your SEO efforts positive and above-board and you’ll enjoy a much better quality of result.

What tricks do you use to improve your search engine rankings? Share a tip with your colleagues below.