One value of placing a business on the web is the opportunity to reach more customers. Our WebBikez bike shop is one example of a company providing a unique product and service that many people around the world are seeking. The goal of many developers and web marketers is to reach those users organically (without purchasing direct advertising) by optimizing the websites and pages for search engines like Google and Bing. Search engines crawl through websites looking for keywords and phrases that describe the website. When a user types a search term into the search engine that matches one of these keywords or phrases, the website appears in the list of returned search items. The better the keywords and phrases, the better the search match for the user. Optimizing a website to provide the most relevant information to the search engines (to get the best matches) is called search engine optimization (SEO).
As the administrator of a website, you can also help improve SEO by checking for problems that will hinder SEO and repairing and redirecting websites to further improve SEO. In this chapter you’ll search for problems such as broken links and you’ll correct URLs that are too long. You’ll set up automatic redirects to help customers find a website that’s moved and even help internal users quickly get to the correct website URL.