SEO is not only about building search engine-friendly websites. It’s about making a site better for
people too. These principles go hand in hand. Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web
and interpret content. A webpage does not always look the same to you as it looks to a search engine.
Modifying web pages so they are structured for both search engines and human visitors alike is very
important.

To perform best in search engine listings, your most important content should be in HTML text format.
Flash files, Java applets, Images and other non-text content are often devalued by search engine
crawlers, even with the advances in technology. The easiest way to ensure that the words you display
to your users are visible to search engines, is to place them in the HTML text on the page. However,
advanced methods are available for those who need greater formatting or visual display styles.

Keywords are integral to the search process. They are the building blocks of language and of search.
The entire science of information retrieval is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the
contents around the web, they keep track of the pages in keyword-based indexes rather than storing
billions of web pages all in one database. Several millions of smaller databases, each centered on a
specific keyword term, allow the engines to retrieve the data they need in a fraction of a second.

Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of ranking in the search results, it’s wise to make
sure the specific word is part of the searchable content of your document. Keywords dominate how we
communicate our search intent and interact with the search engines. When we enter words, the engine
matches pages to retrieve based on the words we entered. The order of the words, punctuation,
spelling and capitalization provide more information that the engines use to help retrieve the right
pages and rank them.

Search engines measure how keywords are used on pages to help determine the importance of a document
to a search. One of the best ways to optimize a page’s rankings is to ensure that the keywords you
want to rank for are prominently used in titles, text, and metadata.

Generally speaking, as you make your keywords more specific, you narrow the competition for search,
and improve your chances of achieving a higher ranking. Since search engines display URLs in the
results, they can impact click-through and visibility. URLs are also used in ranking documents, and
those pages whose names include the queried search terms receive some benefit from proper use of
keywords. URLs make an appearance in the web browser’s address bar, and while this has little impact
on search engines, poor URL structure and design can result in negative user experiences.