Thursday, November 29, 2007

What Is Search Engine Optimization

A good place to start is to address some common questions you may have about what SEO is and the means of implementing it.

What does SEO stand for?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of making a website friendly to search engines and end users. The end result is an increased volume of traffic in your area of the web.

Why not use an SEO consultant?

From my recent experience with SEO consultants they tend to be marketing maniacs with minimal knowledge of technology and enough basic knowledge of search engines to trick people into using their ways.

They tend to use promise you top 10 slots but what they don't tell you is that they are top 10 spots in niche markets with very little volumes of traffic. It is easy to obtain a top 10 position when there are only 50 pages in the search results.

An SEO consultant can also cost you thousands of dollars just to teach you information that is readily available. Here is the pricing plan for a popular SEO consultant:
  • 15 Minute Phone Conversation With No Previous Review of Web Site- $150
  • 1 Hour Phone Conversation With Site Review - $1500
  • Indepth Audit Report and 1 Hour Phone Conversation - $6000
Most likely all the information provided to you about search engine optimization can be derived from free sources.

What is important to search engines?

Search engines look for a variety of things, I tend to view them as hungry children looking for candy. One of the single most delicious items is relevant unique content. Without tasty content you will not do well in your result page rankings.
  • Headings and Bolds - H tags and bolded words have emphasis to the reader and also have emphasis to a search engine.
  • Title Tags - The titles of your pages must be relevant to your content.
  • Keywords - Words that accurately describe the content of your site.
    • Keyword Placement - A search engine will enjoy your keywords at the top of the page more than the ones at the bottom of the page.
    • Keyterm Proximity - Search engines assume if keyterms are placed close to each other they are probably related to each other.
    • Keyword Density - This is calculated and should be between 4% and 8%, if it is over 10% then you may be blacklisted for keyword stuffing and your page not appear in results. There are free tools to calculate this.
    • Keywords in File Names - Using keywords in a filename can change the results of your listings. Just remember use dashes '-' to seperate your words.
  • Image Alt Text and Titles - Short, descriptive phrases tend to do well here.
  • Meta Tags - Google doesn't look at meta-tags any more and other search engines do not deeply look into these. Although the are still nice to have! (Thanks to James for pointing this out)


What will get me blacklisted from a search engine?

A variety of things will get you blacklisted, as long as you use techniques that are not shady and trying to trick the search engine then you will be fine. They may be hungry children but they are intelligent hungry children. Here is what you should not do!
  • Cloaking - Serving different content based upon the User-Agent or IP address of a visitor. This is done to serve up a tasty page to search engines and the opposite to users. Avoid this at all costs.
  • Keyword Stuffing - Overuse of keywords in content and metatags. Stick to between 4 and 8 keywords and check that your keyword density is between 4% and 8%.
  • Doorway Pages - This is a form of cloaking. Highly optimized pages that might use a redirect or meta-refresh to push users to a different page.
  • Hidden Text - Text that is the same color as your background that the search engine spiders can see but users can not.
  • Broken Links - If you can't write a page correctly why should you be listed?
  • Duplicate Content - This just clutters up the search results and all but one page ignored.
To get an idea of how search engines function, read The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, the founders of Google.


Questions, comments and criticism are always welcome, search engine optimization and web development are life long learning adventures.

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