For students, the summer is nearing an end and school will be back in session. Just because most of you long ago completed your formal schooling doesn’t mean you can’t go back to school to learn something important to help your business.

You may have your own Web site or you may assist in the marketing of your employer’s or client’s Web site. While the look of that site is extremely important, so is optimizing the site for the search engines. The term for this is SEO (search engine optimization) and it is something you need to consider when working on Web design. Below are some posts to help you understand SEO and how you can implement it.

• The Top 5 SEO Factors
• Free SEO Tools
• How to Choose a Reputable SEO Company
• If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Any Road Will Do
• Money for Nothing…and Your Clicks For Free
• How Google+ Could Put You in SEO’s First Place
• 5 Quick SEO Tricks To Boost Your Ranking

SEO and Graphics

If you aren’t putting the right graphics on the Web, it can be harmful. First, you’ll want to read Putting the Right Graphics on the Web to understand how to optimize the graphics. Once you have the graphic just right, it is also important to optimize the HTML loading the graphic for the best SEO results. This is covered very well in How to Optimize Images for the Web.

Creating Optimized Web Pages

OK, you’ve now got all of your graphics just right. They look good and they are the proper size in pixels and file size. You’ve even learned the ways to properly insert them on a Web page. Unfortunately you may not be able to insert them the right way if you are using a WYSIWYG Web editor that gives you limited controls. It may seem like the easiest tool for you, but using an HTML editor can be every bit as easy if you learn the basics of HTML and CSS. I did a post a couple of months ago with links to Free Tutorials For Learning HTML and CSS Basics. Take some time to learn these important technologies!

Once you’ve learn the basics, you need a powerful tool to put what you’ve learned into practice. I’ve tried a number of different tools and find WeBuilder 2014 Provides Excellent Code Builder for Web Pages to best one of the best. Download the trial and spend some time with it. In the long run, it is a far better choice for you than the WYSIWYG tools and the price is pretty darned friendly!

Where Do You Rank?

You now have both graphics and Web pages optimized for SEO and you want to see how you rank. Google assigns a Pagerank to each page from 0 to 10. It is easy to Check Google PageRank For All Website Pages At Once using a free utility named Parameter. It is only an overview of the ranking of your pages.

What is most important is how well your site and those of your competitors are performing for the desired search terms. Rapid SEO Tool Makes Researching and Optimizing Search Rankings Easy. Put in the search terms and the URLS of your site and your competitors and it will give you all kinds of details on how you rank and ways to improve your results.

That’s the end of today’s lesson and now it is time for you to do your homework. Improve your graphics. Create optimized HTML and CSS code and watch your SEO rankings move up!