Search engine optimization (SEO) has been an extremely hot topic for years now. A lot of money changes hands all for the sake of working your way up the Google ladder (not to mention other search engines). Many companies specializing in SEO have sprung up; some of them making wild promises and others offering only to do what they can to make sure your ranking is as high as it can be. Where is the truth, and what can you do to optimize your own site?
The first thing that everyone should try to understand before embarking on any SEO, is roughly what a search engine does. The goal of a search engine, of course, is to provide the user with links that are optimally relevant to their specific search query. Companies like Google and Yahoo have refined it to an art. They have massive computers crawling the web in search of content which is subsequently organized and quantified. Sophisticated algorithms look through the content of each web page and classify it in terms of topics and how relevant the content is to those topics.
The easy part of SEO is telling the search engine the topics covered by a web page. The hard part is convincing the engine of your page’s relevance. This is a function of many parameters such as
- Which pages link to your pages and how relevant are they?
- How fresh is your content and how well is your site maintained?
- What is the build quality of your site’s code and how much effort went into it?
- How unique is your content? Copying content from other sites, even popular ones, is no good.
- What are the headings in the page and how well do they relate to your keywords?
- How well have you tried to optimize it: yes, your effort is considered. Note: you can actually try too hard and cost yourself.
- How long have you registered your domain for? Are you a fly-by-night or will you be sticking around? Did you pay to hide your whois ping? Spammers do.
And this is just to name a very very few! Google has hundreds of patents on algorithms for making very intelligent choices for the links it serves up to users.
The moral of the story? Don’t try to cheat the system. All too many SEO companies come in, making promises and often making claims to having some magincal bag of tricks. Usually they won’t want to share these tricks either. They’re snake-oil salesmen and they almost always do more harm than good. If search engines catch you using link farms or otherwise cheating, you can be sure you’re going to end up at the bottom of the search engine’s barrel.
There are reputable SEO companies out there. They won’t make you any promises and they will tell you exactly what they do for your money. Then you can decide if it’s worth it or not. First, you should read what Google has to say about SEO. They have lots of important tips and questions to ask your SEO company.
What can you do for your own site?
If you’re serious about this, the first thing you need to do is download Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide! Print copies of it. Give it to friends and loved ones. Keep one in the den, the office, the bathroom. It’s the best document I’ve seen on the topic and is probably the closest I’ve ever seen to a nickle’s worth of free advice.
Although this advice is in Google’s SEO guide, I think it’s valuable enough to reiterate.
- If you want to be at the top of the ranks, only hard work will get you there. You have to offer premium content that is both unique and relevant and you have to advertise your site. You should freshen your site with new content at least two or three times a week. If you’re a company, get your CEO to blog! If not the CEO, then someone from the marketing team. Regular additions make you relevant.
- Understand social marketing and social media. It is not only a very important part of SEO, it is some of the most inexpensive advertising you’ll ever get! Twitter, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon — Get on these and be loud. Offer exclusive content or contests for users who spread your word around on these social sites.
- Sign up for Google’s Webmaster Tools and make full use of them.
- Lastly but perhaps most importantly, think quality and not quantity. You don’t want users on your site who don’t care about your content. You don’t want a site linking to you if that site’s content has nothing to do with your site’s content. If you’re getting lots of page hits but your average time on site is less than a couple of minutes, they’re not buying anything or clicking on adds, then what good do those hits do for you? Your page hits alone aren’t a good measure of popularity or success.
Follow these tips and your site’s success will match the quality of its content. That’s all any webmaster can ever ask for. There’s just no substitute for rich, fresh and relevant content for both website visitors and search engines.
