Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as defined on Wikipedia is “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via natural search results for targeted keywords.”
In other words, SEO is the act of carrying out activities within and outside of your website to ensure a better placement in search engine results for your keywords.
Keywords? What are those?
Keywords or keyphrases are what people are searching for on the search engines – those are the terms you are looking to optimize your website for. In other words if you are blogging about Michael Jordan, then you probably want your site to show up in the top 10 results when anyone searches for Michael Jordan on Google. In this example, Micahel Jordan is your keyphrase that you need to optimize your website for.
Of course, the keywords you choose has a direct bearing on the difficulty you will have in optimizing your website and getting it to list higher in search results. What this means is that if you choose a very popular keyword (which a lot of other sites are also optimizing for) then it is much harder to get your site placed in the top 10 results. On the other hand, there is no point choosing a not so popular keyword because then no one will be searching for it and so you will not get any traffic from a search engine from that keyword.
Alright, so I know my keywords that I want to optimize for… now what? Now you need to make sure that search engines think that you are one of the best sites on the Internet for your chosen keywords and key phrases. And how do we do that? Different search engines have different ways of answering that question. There are a lot of factors that search engines consider to calculate where they will place a particular site in search results for a particular set of keywords (Google uses over 300 factors, and PageRank is just one of them).
While discussing all possible techniques to get a good search engine placement is way beyond the scope of this post, we can broadly categorize these techniques in two: White Hat and Black Hat.
White Hat techniques are actions you can take which do no violate the guidelines presented by various search engines. If you are using only white hat techniques then you will never be penalized by the search engines. It should be mentioned that White Hat techniques also take a much longer time to show results and are usually harder to implement.
Black Hat techniques are employed specifically to game the search engine algorithms. They are meant to artificially inflate the authority of your website for given keywords. Of course, if you are found, you will be banned from search engine results.
Black Hat Techniques include:
- Blog Spamming
- Keyword Spamming
- Page Count Inflation
- Forum Spamming
- Link Farms
- Cloaking
- And many more
- Link Exchange
Of course, there are many more out there and I will not discuss what each one of the above does. The only reason I mentioned them is that so that you can avoid them if you see them.
White Hat techniques usually are much tamer. Broadly 3 things should be kept in mind:
- Your websites should be well designed keeping SEO in mind.
- Content is King. If you don’t have too much content, then you are not adding any value to the person who visits your site looking for it.
- You should have content worth linking to. Nothing gives you more authority then genuine links that you receive from other sites. This is also called LinkBaiting (and is a topic for the following article).
- You should follow search engine guidelines (here are Google’s)
There are many experts out there who you can hire and get suggestions on optimizing your website from the SEO perspective. However, there are a lot of fakes out there as well who would use black hat techniques to temporarily give a boost to your rankings, take your money, and then leave as your rankings plummet to the ground. You need to be careful. The best way is to educate yourself about what SEO is and then make your decisions. here are some excellent links which you can use to educate yourself about SEO (and you can keep coming back here from time to time as well):
Wil Reynolds is a well respected authority on the subject of SEO. Here is an excerpt from a presentation he gave on SEO Best Practices at Affiliate Summit in 2007.
Well, that was about as short an introduction to SEO as there ever was. I will be more than glad to respond to any questions or comments. Please leave them in the comments for this post.
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