Vanderbilt Emergency Medicine

What is search engine optimization and how can I make it work for me? Simply put, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is formating your site to where a search engine or search engine robot can find it. When you talk about SEO you'll hear people use words like "Spider" "Crawl" "Indexing" etc. all of these terms really only mean that the search engine is going to archive a basic linkage to any and all information on your site.

Each search engine operates a little bit differently than the others so it is important to follow a few broader rules that can apply to searching in multiple arenas. 

Here's the 3 basics:

1. Make sure all your pages have META TAGS - specific keywords and descriptions that you place in the of your pages.

2. Give all of your pages titles that link specifically back to the homepage ie - "Page name - Site Name"  

3. Create a sitemap and submit it to the search engine directly

For more advanced information visit: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291