Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A guide to search engine optimization.

Guide to SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) means coding your pages so that they are more likely to show up in search engine results for certain keywords and phrases. When it comes to searches, search engines use complex algorithms based on a site's information and html to rank sites. There are no specific rules for anything in SEO - just general guidelines. Google provides a guide for webmasters to look at to learn more about SEO.

You should know that many optimization campaigns take at least 3-6 months to see good results so you need to be patient and not waste your time by checking your progress every day. It is also important to understand that learning the technical aspects of SEO isn't enough to get good rankings. Your web site still has to be a good website with good content.

My SEO philosophies

  • If you are a beginnner just learning SEO, there are easy things you can do and hard things. Do the easy things first.

  • When it comes to deciding whether or not to engage in shady SEO techniques by tricking Google, the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law should govern your actions. If you take advantage of loopholes and get away with things that wouldn't make Google happy, then Google will eventually change these rules and you'll be punished.

  • When evaluating whether or not a specific SEO tactic make sense then just use logic. For example, would you consider a page four levels deep less important than a page one level deep? I would. Therefore, I think the search engines would too.

  • Realize that if there is a successful site that has good SEO then the SEO is not the cause of a site's success: the reason is good content. There are webmasters who spend very little time adding and updating their content but spend a lot of time studying the search engine algorithms to try to optimize their site.

  • Grow and improve your site. Think about the theoretical implications of SEO: SEO isn't, by itself, a long-term strategy. All these strategies (meta tags, title tags, keywords) will eventually be used by all sites. At that point every web site will be doing the same things. The key success factor that will never change is that the better rankings will go to the better site. If you are using the same SEO tactics as your competitor's sites but your site is ranking ahead theirs then that is because of luck and not skill. Is this the strategy you want? To get lucky? A big deal was made about Wikipedia's massive rise in SEO over the last couple of years. Some people think it is unfair because they think Wikipedia automatically has a good ranking on any phrase simply because of it's size. But this is wrong. The reason for their good ranking is because their site is usually the best resource for whatever information is being searched for. When people do a web search they want to find relevant information and Wikipedia provides that.

  • Create your page, optimize it, then forget about it (for now). Too many people spend too much time on SEO forums trying to learn new tricks when they should be spending their time increasing their content and growing their site. Unless your site actually needs an SEO facelift don't spend any time worrying about it. There are things that affect your SEO that you can control and things you can't. Do what you can and then just live with what you get.

  • Make your code as simple as possible. Having non-essential code in your page just dilutes everything else. I like when I view the source code of a site and I can clearly delineate the code - you can see the title tags, then the meta tags, then the opening body tag, then the opening div tag for the actual design. I hate opening up the source code to a site and having to figure out what is what.

Your relationship to search engines

  • Terms and conditions - Google has rules they want you to follow and if you break those rules or do things that are likely to harm Google then they will kick you out. When it comes to deciding whether or not to use a particular SEO technique that may be shady then just pretend Google is a partner company that is run by your best friend. Would you use that tactic and not tell your friend?

    I hardly ever read search engine guidelines. The reason is that I have good judgment and I know that Google is a partner whose needs should be respected by webmasters. But I recommend reading that link for educational purposes but not necessarily for strategic reasons. In other words, read the page to learn about SEO but don't MAKE the search engine guidelines your SEO strategy.

  • Algorithms - There are many webmasters that read SEO forums trying to decipher search algorithms to try to find the magic formula to getting good results. Don't be one of those people. First of all, much of what you read on the internet about SEO will be opinion and rumor. You don't want your strategy to be based on what some random comment on the internet. You won't ever know for a fact whether your hypothesis is correct so you'll always be guessing and will never be able to find proof.

    But most importantly, if you spend all your time trying to find the magic formula then you will have wasted time and passed up on the opportunity to create more content. The search engine algorithms that Google uses change all the time anyway so even if you found some meaningful information your hunt will be a never-ending endeavor of chasing a constantly moving target. The irony is that if you (or many webmasters) were to find out what the algorithms were and created sites according to what the algorithms wanted then Google would just change the algorithms because Google wants to reward pages that are created to make web users happy, not pages that were created to make search engines happy. So there is no real way to "beat" the algorithms - just create a great site and don't worry about it.

  • PageRank - PageRank is all about your inbound links. It's determined by the quantity and quality of the links to your site. PageRank has become one of those indicators that has attained an unhealthy amount of attention from webmasters lately. I say unhealthy because it does not tell you how much traffic your site gets or how good the content is. My advice is to not bother looking at pagerank because it is one of those indicators that will take care of itself. If you build good content then you PR will be fine, if not then you aren't doing your job. I have web sites that I have run for years but have never checked their pagerank. Your home page will have the highest PageRank because it is the page that is usually linked to from other sites.


 
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