Steven Evatt, Sr. Online System Admin, Houston Chronicle

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn't the sexiest topic in the world, but it's an incredibly important part of users being able to find web sites. That leads to greater viewership, which in turn leads to potentially more lucrative advertising opportunities.

With that in mind, Steven Evatt, a senior online system administrator for Chron.com, the Houston Chronicle's web site, offered a basic education about helping users find your web site through search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Before understanding SEO, Evatt said, you need to understand the three basic components to a search engine:

• A "spider," which is a program designed to visit web sites, sift through their content and find information that could be relevant to searches.
• An index, which is created by information derived from the spider, and ultimately used by the search engine during a search by a user.
• An algorithm, which is a formula the search engine uses to categorize the index results in order for searches to be effective.

"We can't control the algorithm," Evatt said, "but we can control the spider, and dictate where it goes on our site." That creates an effective index that allows users to find the site easily. So by adjusting the site content and structure, he said, it allows for better indexing and more relevant search results.

Google is the most popular search engine by far, with 50 to 60 percent of the market in North America. Chron.com gets 68 percent of its searches from Google, so they decided to optimize for Google, Evatt said, although Google discourages that practice. "They say you should concentrate on the user experience and your audience first before you start being concerned about whether your site comes up on search engines," he said. "Ultimately, content is king. Without content, you have nothing."

While on the surface, SEO doesn't seem that important, Evatt said that chron.com got valuable buy-in from top level executives. "Twenty percent of our traffic comes from search engines," he pointed out. "That's a very significant number. If we were to lose any of that, we would have a lot of salespeople having heart attacks immediately."

He gave some tips to help search-engine visibility for web sites:

• Include as much automation in the optimization process as possible, since hundreds of people will be working on the site at any given time, and not all of them understand how the process works. The more the process is automated, the more consistent search-engine rankings will be.
• Include relevant words in the title of each page, including the area name, site name and publication name. This makes it easier for search engines to index the site accurately. At Chron.com, Evatt said, this is automated through its content management system. Ultimately, the most important keywords should come first, since that's what Google looks at first.
• Links are the next most important things, he said. The more links you have to other content, the more important Google thinks your site is. At Chron.com, multiple links are automatically placed in each story to other stories, other sections and to related blogs. If the site is rich in links, Google values it highly.
• Follow a consistent site structure with a logical navigation and no "dead" pages. That makes it easier for the spiders, he said. "If the user site maps are easy to use, you'll be rewarded by the search engines."

The bottom line? Because of its efforts toward search engine optimization, Evatt said, Chron.com is the third highest ranking newspaper web site in the country as measured by third-party metrics, with more search results than newspapers that are a great deal larger and have a great deal more staff.