Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the art of getting a website (more accurately a web page) higher in the search engines' rankings.
The ultimate objective is to achieve the most coveted number one ranking for a keyword that gets a decent amount of searches each day.
Why go to all the trouble? Because a high ranking can, for the right keyword, mean a deluge of traffic to your website that costs absolutely nothing! Free traffic is money in the bank.
Google and the other search engines are very secretive about how they decide which sites to rank higher than others. They frequently drop hints, but much of the time those hints seem to be misinformation designed to throw people off the real scent.
The search engines don't want us to know how their algorithm works because as soon as we do, millions of people will start to 'game' the system and any search results will become worthless.
Google's algorithm is suspected to have over 120 factors, but nobody other than a few Google insiders, who will never speak out openly, have any real idea what they all are. Many observers do try to work out the major factors that count the most, and some have had some apparent success, but even then, Google can easily change the way they do things overnight. And they often do!
Broadly, search engine optimization boils down to two things: the stuff you do on your web page and the stuff that you do outside of it.
The on-page stuff includes making sure that the search engine can work out what your page is about and making sure it has sufficient readable content so that the search engines will consider it to be an authority page for a given keyword.
There are lots of factors you can manipulate: keyword density, latent semantic 'theme' words, number of words, headlines, images and alternative text fields and so on. But it is all too easy to go so overboard on 'optimizing' that your page starts to look unnatural and that it has been created more for the search engine than for the reader.
That error can be a trigger that gets your site downgraded in the search results, so be careful!
Off page optimization is really all about getting other sites to display links to your page. These are called backlinks and are at the heart of how Google decides if a site is an authority or not.
When Google's founders, Page and Brin, first developed the search engine that would become Google, they called it BackRub. That was a direct reference to the fact that their revolutionary new model gave a web page a score based on how many other sites linked to it. Page and Brin surmised that these links constituted 'votes' for a web page's value.
Of course, it is very easy to manipulate the system by dumping millions of backlinks to your web pages on other sites - blogs, forums, article directories, video sites and so on - so the system was further refined to adjust the value of each 'vote' according to the authority of the site where the backlink appears.
SEO experts have a list of things you must do on page and a strategy for getting lots of backlinks, of the right quality, off page. But all this tends to ignore what I consider to be the real secret to getting a high ranking.
Yes, you need the on and off page stuff, but on their own they will not ensure you of anything.
To really make a difference you need the secret factor that so many website builders, in their haste to scramble to the top, forget about: Common sense.
All the evidence appears to be showing that Google's spiders are becoming more and more intelligent. They can spot a site that has been over optimized. They can smell a site that has had too many backlinks dumped online too quickly and they can sense when they are being gamed.
Which means that the clever website builders will take a steadier, more natural approach to everything they do. They won't rush. They won't suddenly have 1000 backlinks appear from nowhere and they certainly won't have content on their sites that reads as if a robot wrote it.
They will take a sensible, unhurried approach and will build real web pages that the search engines will be proud to display.
The age of filling up the Internet with garbage because Google was not sophisticated enough to spot it are ending. Google has got smart and so we as web builders need to get smart too - and create valuable, on-topic, authoritative content.
That's the number one secret of SEO as we move into a new search engine optimization paradigm.
No comments:
Post a Comment