Articles : Kevin Dehu : SEO
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SEO is a new acronym, a buzzword symbolizing recognition of a new internet-related profession: Search Engine Optimization. The pros who do it are called SEOs, and they are in big demand.
Because in the world of the internet business, it's not having a site that's important. Having a site is assumed. The important part is getting customers to your site. Not just a lot of traffic, but relevant traffic. You want people to find your site when they are searching for your product.
It used to be that you gave out your url on your business card, and your potential customer typed it into their browser to get to your webpages. When websites were new, just having one was cool. But once everyone had one, promotion became the name of the game. The pr efforts grew new business into the old media - you could advertise your url in a print ad. This worked well and still works today. Then came the banner ad blitz, when it seemed like the old media model of paid ads could apply to the internet. It got out of hand. Sites that got lots of hits could charge big bucks for a banner. It made logical sense - lots of eyeballs should mean lots of impressions, and therefore sales. But sales did not always follow the promotion. The whole pay for exposure fiasco became evident and self destructed on that memorable Super Bowl, when all those dot coms paid millions to show their doomed urls to the football fans, using outrageously expensive ads to do it.
Of course, paid advertising continues to be one of many valid ways to promote your site. So you spend money to get people to your webpages, which can provide a compelling sales pitch. But in some ways, that's just the problem. You're promoting your site. And paying for it. What you should be doing is promoting your PRODUCT!
Before we get to how an SEO addresses this problem, there is one other piece of information you need to understand what is happening in cyberspace. It has to do with spiders. Not bugs, but software protocols that automatically travel around on the internet gathering information on sites by following links. These spiders try to find and index every web page. It's a daunting task, but they do it, and some do it very well.
These spiders are collecting all this information 24/7 for their masters: the search engines. That's how Google knows what's out there, and how to categorize it when you use them to do a search. The incredible ability of search engines to gather and accurately prioritize all this information is at the heart of an SEO's understanding.
Let's get back to the problem. You're promoting your site, when you should be promoting your product.
An effective SEO helps website owners maximize their ability to use keyword searches to drive potential customers to their site. So if you're selling lightbulbs, you want to make sure your company website appears in the first page of a search for "lightbulbs." Without optimization, your site might not even be seen by someone looking for your product. Clearly, having a site that is on the results page for a particular search is a valuable asset. This is the service provided by an effective SEO.
The features that make a site search engine friendly are quite simple. Although some still rely on hidden meta tags and meta key words written into the header of the html, Google focuses on something much more easy to understand: the content. By using the appropriate keywords within the content of your site, you increase your sites association with those words, and hence your rank in the search. Make sure the text of your site uses, and uses often, the keywords and keyword combinations that you want to be ranked for. Text size is important, as well as those words used at the top of the page, and at the bottom. Images don't count. In fact they are completely ignored. As is all that Flash animation. This stuff actually gets in the way of what the spiders are doing - finding the content, the text, the words.
Also very important, sometime the most important, factor is the age of the site. Older is better. It is easier to obtain a high rank by optimizing an internal page of an old site, than optimizing the homepage of a brand new one. Google has great respect for the elders, because tradition and legacy matter.
Another very significant factor is the number of incoming links, and the rank of the site from which those links come. The lesson here is that you can never have enough links, especially from large, old sites. Spend time finding related sites that would want to swap links. Rank is directly related to incoming links.
Search engine optimization helps you to promote your product, using your website, by putting it in front of people who are searching for what you offer. And it's focus is the words that describe your product or service. Good seo involves a better understanding your product, and of the words that describe your offering. Then, using this understanding, the seo can carefully choose and apply those descriptives to your site in a manner relevant to the spiders, as well as the people who click on the results of their search. By monitoring your site content to better reflect anticipated keyword searches, optimization enables you to use the search engine as a marketing tool.
One of the coolest things about SEO, is that it results in highly effective, free promotion. You have to work to achieve and maintain it, but there is no paid advertising involved. This makes it possible for a very small business to have a meaningful market presence by virtue of solid SEO.
by Kevin Dehu, SEO
(Kevin, a super geek working at kids-songs.org has numerous articles on this portal)
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