If I say the phrase, Orthodox author to you, what name comes to mind? Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? Perhaps a Theological writer like Bishop Kallistos Ware or Father Alexander Schmemann?

But, if you searched for the phrase Orthodox author using Google for the first few weeks of December 2007, you wouldn't find any of those famous authors at the top of the search results.

Instead, you would find Heather Zydek and Father Leon Castner .

Look at the results page below to see this:

How is that possible that these two Orthodox authors ranked first and second out of 683,000 results returned for the search phrase Orthodox author?

The secret is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. That is the art of getting your organic placement in search engines high enough to be found easily by people looking for what you offer.

In this blog entry, I'm going to provide some tips and tricks for helping your search engine placement. The goal here is not to make all of you SEO gurus over night. The field is way too complex to cover all the intricacies of it in a mere blog entry. But there are some relatively simple things you can do, and do immediately, to help out your search engine placement.

Tip 1: Make your site name count.

The site name is what appears in the upper bar of the browser. Most organizations just put their names in the site name fields, as you see below:

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America is, of course, the name of the site. But, Google and other search engines give very high weight to a site's name when matching up search words. So, to help beef up your placement, consider adding in additional descriptive text to your site's name.

For example:

Notice that the site's name is Orthodox Biz, but the site name is actually read by Google as an entire string that includes a lot of keywords such as Orthodox Christian Business Directory, Blogs, Articles, Networking, Music, and File Sharing as shown above.

Having those additional keywords in the site's name helps boost search engine placement, as Google assumes that your site's name is a good indication of what the site is about. It is harder to fake your site name than it is to just list strings of meaningless keywords as Meta tags that are not even displayed to anyone.

Tip 2: Make your URLs Count.

What is this article about:

http://www.goarch.org/en/archbishop/demetrios/encyclicals/detail.asp?id=178

You can't tell by looking at the above URL?

Neither can Google.

How about this one:

www.orthodoxbiz.com/member-interviews/interview-with-heather-zydek-orthodox-christian-author.html

This article is clearly an interview with a specific person who is an Orthodox author. When you see the URL, you immediately understand that fact.

Guess what?

So does Google. That's why searching for Orthodox Author puts you straight through to Heather's interview on Orthodox Biz.

Now, back to our first example, how much better would the first URL be if it said this:

www.goarch.org/encyclicals/patriarchal_declaration_christmas_2007

Now this article is immediately recognizable as being a Patriarchal declaration for Christmas.

Google and other search engines do not search the Web. They search huge data-bases that they have created using information gathered by their bots from Websites.

The URLs of Web pages form a very important part of the indexing of that information. If you use generic or non-legible URLs, then you are just making yourself harder to find on the Web because you are missing that unique indexing.

Make your URLs unique based on the content they refer back to, and you have a much better chance of getting located.

Tip 3: Use Metadata!

Meta descriptions tell a potential reader about your content. They are the text that pop up under the page title in a search engine results page. Many people leave these blank on individual items, and so end up rendering just the generic information for the site.

That is a huge mistake. Each article or page is unique. Give it a unique description. And use good keywords in the description to help boost your ranking.

Don't get too carried away with pithy marketing language which fails to mention the most important keywords that Web users will be using to search for the article/content. And don't just copy the first paragraph and use it either. Most initial paragraphs are meant to grab the attention of the reader, but they are usually keyword poor and not likely to get the attention of a search engine query.

Write a readable, but keyword-rich, description for each and every article or piece of content that you publish.

Google and other search engines pay way more attention to Meta descriptions than they do to Meta keywords. Google understands that the descriptions actually show to end users. Keywords don't - so there is always a temptation to put in lists of keywords that refer to things you don't actually cover on your site.

For that reason, keywords are way less important than Meta descriptions, but you need to include both.

Tip 4: Publish Articles on Other Sites.

Building traffic on a new site is tough, but one way to improve your ability to get found is to publish articles on other sites. Publishing on another site with reference to your primary site helps you to take advantage of that other site's search engine profile. The other Webmaster gets content, and you get an article that can pop you higher in search engine queries.

It's a win-win for both of you.

This is especially critical if your Website is on a platform that doesn't have a lot of Search Engine friendly features. A lot of sites built using Web builder tools don't support unique URLs, for example, and so publishing to a site that does will help boost your search profile.

Tip 5: Get Links to Multiple Pages on Your Site

Most Webmasters focus on just getting links to their primary page. That's great, but see if you can get links to other areas of your site as well. For example, if you have a blog, try to get links directly to that blog instead of making users always get to that blog via the front page.

One way to get links is to trade links with other Webmasters. Another is to join a directory that will allow you to have a profile.

A final, easy way is to use social bookmarking sites like Digg. These services are free, and let you bookmark articles from your site. Search engines readily pick these up. This will greatly increase the likelihood of the articles scoring high in searches, but be wary - the bump is fleeting unless other readers Digg the story also.

Tip 6: Get a Sitemap, and Register It with Google.

You can sign up for Webmaster services on Google's main site. You then need to generate a site map like this one.

A site map helps search placement immensely by helping Google accurately index more of the links on your site.

If you use Joomla or some other CMS tool, there are great site maps that are either native to the application, or which can be installed as extensions.

If you use HTML, there are scripts you can run to generate the XML for the sitemap.

However you get the site map created and registered with Google, you will be very, very glad that you did. Sites which put in a good site map often see their organic search engine placement rocket to the top.

One big tip - make sure your site map component or script can work with all the applications you run on your site! The last thing you need is huge gaps in your site map because the site map tool couldn't read the data from your shopping cart (for example).

Tip 7: Publish or Perish.

You need to frequently update your site with new content for a variety of reasons. First, seach engines like fresh content. Search engines don't like to deliver stale, outdated articles to users. That kind of thing drives users away, and search engines need them to stick around. So, if your site has old content that hasn't changed for months, then don't expect Google to be kind to you. The fresher your site is, the better you can expect to do.

And because search engines like fresh content, don't expect your killer, keyword rich masterpiece to keep its position at the top of the results page. New content coming into the indexes will bump you down. It's a war out there, and fresh content is your most effective weapon in keeping ground.

Second, you will never be able to stuff all the keywords about your ministry or business in one article or one page. To make maximum use of URLs and meta-descriptions, write smaller articles more frequently to explore the various aspects of what your organization is all about. This helps you get a lot of unique, keyword-rich URLs, and also helps keep you feeding the content monster.

Third, users won't keep coming back to read the same old same old, even if they find you to begin with. I think this point speaks for itself, but if you want to explore this point more deeply, then consider reading my post on Blogging for Business.

Fourth, last but not least, keeping fresh content on your site raises the frequency with which search engines re-index your site. Stale sites can end up in the penalty box and get scanned only once a month. That is very frustrating to go through when you do put new pages/articles on such a site, only to not see the new stuff show up on Google until four weeks later. The more you publish, the easier it is to get more content picked up by Google.

If your Web platform does not support frequent publication of articles, then get a different platform.

Conclusion

This list was not meant to be all-inclusive. Obviously, this is a huge topic and is also an ever changing one. Google and other search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms, in addition to improving their capabilities with images and video.

But, if you will take these suggestions seriously and work on them, then you search engine results will certainly improve, and may even do so drastically.

In other words, these are all great things to start with, but don't be suprised if you roll all these suggestions out into production only to find that the work is just starting! Search Engine Optimization is not something you can do once and forget about. Rather, SEO is a process and needs to form an integral part of how you manage your site.

Think of it more as a lifestyle than an event.