Introduction to SEO

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, quite simply, figuring out how to get your website to be at the top of the list when people Google for your business. When people search for something, they almost always look at only the first ten results (the first page); in fact, usually they only look at the first few results, so going from #11 to #10 or #10 to #7 or #7 to #3 can result in a huge difference in website traffic.

Yes, there are a multitude of other search engines, but Google is by far the most important. Most search engines get their results from Google or Bing. Google holds the lion’s share of the search engine market.

Are others worth considering? Yes, here are some to contemplate:

• YouTube Video Search
• Twitter Search Results
• Bing
• Google Maps

There are specialized marketing strategies that call for a concerted marketing effort in one of those arenas, or other specialty sites. However, for the vast majority of businesses, Google is everything.

“SEO Experts”

I do not claim to be any sort of SEO expert. This is for two principal reasons:

1. Being a true SEO Expert requires focused specialization, daily immersion, research and experimentation purely on SEO
2. There are a lot of negative connotations surrounding “SEO Experts”

SEO is Hard

For someone to truly be “expert,” they would have to be studying SEO daily; not just monitoring their own sites, but reading blogs, researching and conducting experiments to see if they can determine what actually works. All too often people rely on hearsay or on unscientific experiments.

Google’s search engine ranking formula is immensely complex. Google uses over 200 signals to determine which how high a website ranks in search results. (Where a signal is just an important factor of a website… from the authority of sites linking to your site, to the age of your site, to how long many years in advance your domain name has been registered for.) The formula is constantly evolving as Google strives to improve their results and to combat search engine abuse. This formula is also kept top secret, for the simple reason that if people knew the formula, they would learn how to “game the system,” regardless of whether or not their content was what searchers were actually looking for.

Now imagine how difficult it is to judge the impact of a website characteristic that may or may not be one of those signals. There are far too many self-proclaimed “SEO Experts” who actually aren’t as knowledgeable as they’d like you to believe… or worse yet, have no integrity whatsoever.

SEO and Ethics

“White hat” and “black hat,” in the context of SEO, refer to how ethical the SEO Expert’s approach is.

Black Hat SEO

Ever since search engines have existed, people have tried to cheat them. Having more links to your site gets you a higher ranking? Let’s buy some links and make up fake sites that do nothing but link to our site. The more times we use a keyword, the better we rank for that keyword? Let’s keyword make keyword every sentence keyword include the keyword on the site–and perhaps include several paragraphs at the bottom of every page, in text the same color as the background to make it invisible to the human eye, listing every keyword we can think of.

Of course, Google hires geniuses for a reason. Over the years they have constantly refined their algorithm to detect and punish these cheaters. Someone practicing black hat SEO might achieve short-term success, but sooner or later they are discovered and punished by Google: sometimes by drastically lowering their rank, sometimes be removing them from the Google index completely. In fact, Google has a form where you can report spam sites.

White Hat SEO

White hat SEO simply means playing by the rules, following Google’s guidelines and striving to have a site that deserves to be at the top of Google.

Google wants to return the results that the person doing the searching is looking for: websites with a strong reputation and helpful content.

How can you do this?

• Have a lot of useful content on your website related to your topic
• Update regularly with new content
• Have many links from other sites

Of course, if you’re regularly putting out useful, informative content that people are looking for and find helpful, they’ll share it with each other and are more likely to link to it. Also, if you have a lot of content, you’ll be more likely to rank well for “long-tail” searches… long, unlikely search phrases that not as many people are searching for. However, if it so happens that each of your pages attracts a handful of people each month with those long-tail phrases as they try to find answers to very specific questions, then that all adds up.

Of course, there is more to SEO than this. There are many small factors to consider in the design of a website, essentially to make it easy for Google to understand what the site is about.

There are also other successful strategies. If you come out with a viral video that is popular on YouTube and Digg, you may get so many views and links from that you don’t need anything else. If you are in a niche market and have a few excellent, informative articles on your site and get a few links (from a chamber of commerce, trade association, etc.) then that may be enough to help you outrank local small business webpages in the same community in the same niche. But to be sure of ranking well in a competitive environment, you must have patience and a great deal of time to consistently put out valuable content and gradually build up your website’s reputation with Google.