SEO Facts

My thoughts on SEO--and this is purely my opinion--is that the business is getting rather like the world of haute cuisine. You will get one esteemed chef who swears that the only way to make a roux is in a cast iron frying pan. Another will say this is poppycock and you absolutely can't create a roux without a stainless steel pan. But both chefs enjoy phenominal success and a great gastronomic following.

And so it is with SEO. Optimizing is a mixture of art and science. You will find that while the basics are the same, such as choosing keywords and avoiding techniques that will get you penalized by the Big Guns, for each project there area thousand variables and each SEO consultant will apply a different set of SEO rules. They'll all get good results though. Puzzling.

Again though, there are plenty of areas where everyone's in agreement, and I won't include anything here that even might get you penalized. Read on with confidence!

So how do we go about optimizing a website so that the search engines absolutely love it? Ideally, the process will begin at birth. Right from the beginning of the design stage, website concepting should be carried out with serious consideration to how the pages will be viewed by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Yes, there are tons of other search engines, but these three are the ones that will bring the bulk of your responses, so you'd better give them the lion's share of attention.

Because search engines hate websites that load slowly, you will be giving yourself a huge boost by selecting a CSS design for your website. Css is a way of keeping the code of a web page light, because the style properties are all kept in one place and don't need to be repeated ad nauseum. This was certainly the case with HTML.

Then, keep pictures as small as you can, while still retaining the desired effect.

Try and hire someone who understands how to optimize your code and tags. Having optimized META tags allows you to tel the search engines how you want to be seen, and which keywords you want to be searched for.

Website code should be as light as possible. The old way of designing in HTML was very heavy: most designs would take ages to load, and this needs to be avoided at all costs. So developers tried to create methods of building web pages that didn't take ages to load, yet gave the results we demanded in terms of good looks and usability.

For a long time, cascading style sheets were cutting edge. They not only allowed for faster production of visually stunning web pages, due to the fact that graphical aspects of design are controlled by one central style sheet, but they meant that code volume could be slashed. Now, most of the pages you see on the web owe at least part of their appearance to CSS, including this one.

Now though, we have several new technologies coming up that promise even more amazing results than CSS. More about those later (keep checking back).

This brings us to another vital aspect of SEO. Optimizing your content involves choosing the right keywords for your goods or services. For example, I'm an SEO copywriter, so I choose "SEO copywriter" as my primary keyphrase. Next, I list other keywords or phrases that people might key into a search when looking for my services. They might use "quality web copy" or "professional copywriter," for example.

Next, web pages need around 300 words of quality content, enriched with your chosen keywords. Never include a keyword in your copy that isn't mentioned in your Keywords META tag, and never include a keyword in your META tag that isn't included in your copy.

Even when you have optimized your tags, copy and titles (try and include your keywords in your titles wiithout making it looks stilted and obvious), we're still not done.

You may get a good ranking with Yahoo and MSN just using the techniques we've already outlined. But to get anywhere at all with Google, you're going to need links, and as many of them as you possibly can. This is called external SEO, and it can make a world of difference to your online presence. One way to do it is to write articles and arrange for them to be posted on other websites with a link back to you.

Blogging can get you a lot of serious attention, both from the search engines and from potential customers. Blagging isn't for everyone though. It takes commitment and inspiration to be able to write about something every day over a long period of time. If you dont think you can do it, think about teaming up with another couple of writers with similar or complimentary businesses. You can both benefit from the juicy traffic an active blog can generate.

You can see more about selecting keywords on my new blog: marketmou.com-blog

There is a vast body of knowledge that constitutes "search engine optimization." Some of it is good, kind and beneficial to both the website owner, the surfer and the Internet in general. This is referred to as organic optimization, and the person who does it is called a White Hat.

On the other hand, those who will turn their hand to anything in order to get fast results, often hurt others in the process, and their own website nearly always suffers in the long run. These people are called Black Hats.

Examples of their activities include pay per click fraud, content "cloaking," which is hidden text and hidden links.

There are areas of SEO practice that don't belong to either camp. You can read more about them by clicking on the Black Hat, White Hat link below.

The new buzzword in the SEO community is 'Link Baiting.' It's well known by now that Google will only give you the time of day if you have enough links coming into your site. So the problem for many website owners or bloggers is how to get those links.

One important source of links is 'linkworthiness,' if I can call it that. Put interesting enough content on your pages and people will want to link to it all by themselves. This is what Link Baiting is, put in the most simplified way.

It may take you some time, but think of something controversial or highly popular, and write about it. You may not see much action at first, but when it gets indexed and word gets out, if it's good enough, the traffic will come. And people will link to it.

I discovered a really excellent blog post on the subject a few days ago. I encourage you to go there now and do your online presence a favor by reading it: Brandon's blog. Incidentally, this blog is a perfect example of Link Baiting in itself: It is attracting a lot of attention because so many people are desperate to understand Link Baiting.

Just about any type of promotion or PR work you do, online or off, is likely to ultimately affect your website ranking, if it could conceivably result in traffic.

This is known as "external SEO," or "off page SEO." It can be even more important than "internal SEO," or "on page SEO, which is that which you do to your website!

Getting links is a critical strategy. With Google in particular, you will gain a little credibility for every single link you have coming into your site.

Inbound links that are not reciiprocal are far more valuable to you than those that require you to also have a link from your site to the linking site.

Another credibility boost is having highly relevant links. For example, valuable links for me would be anything to do with website optimization, and particularly SEO.

One of the best ways to get links is to get hold of a list of online directories and get busy. It's time consuming, but it works. If you'd like a list, contact me at consultant [at] marketmou.com.

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