What is SEO? For me, search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of getting a website to work better with search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.
You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or MSN
To get into Google, for instance, you must consider and largely abide by search engine rules and guidelines for inclusion (Dell XPS M1210 Battery) .
It’s thought all search engines rank websites by the quality of incoming links to a site from other websites and hundreds of other metrics. Generally speaking, a link from a page to another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page the link points to (Dell Studio XPS 1340 Battery) .
If you have original quality content on a site, you have a chance of generating quality links. If your content is found on other websites, you will find it hard to get links. If you have decent original content on your site, you can let authority websites, those with online business authority, know about it, and they might link to you – the result being a quality IBL (Dell Studio XPS 1640 Battery) .
Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be ignored by search engines (the attribute nofollow effectively cancels out a link, for instance)
Search engines find your site by other web sites linking to it. You can also submit your site to search engines direct, but I haven’t submitted my site to a search engine in the last 5 years (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ11S Battery) .
Google spiders this link, finds your site, and indexes the home page of your site, and will come back to spider the rest of your website if all your pages are linked together.
Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for competitive terms until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in Google. This is the called “the sandbox theory” filters (Dell Vostro 1710 Battery) .
I think this depends on the quality of the incoming links Google finds your website by.
To rank for specific keyword searches, you generally need to have the words on your page (not necessarily altogether, but it helps) or in links pointing to your page/site. Ideally, a mixture of both.
As a result of other sites linking to your site, the site now has a certain amount of “Google Juice” (or what I would call “Google Heat(!)” you can share with all the internal pages that make up your website (ASUS EEE PC900 battery) .
Yes, you need to build links to your site to aquire Google Juice.
When you have Google Juice or Heat, try and spread it throughout your site by linking down.
I think your external links to to other sites should probably be on your single pages, the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the higher pages in your site (the home page, your category pages) (Sony Vaio VGN-FZ61B battery) .
It’s not JUST a numbers game. One link from a “trusted authority” site in Google could be all you need. Of course, the more “trusted” links you build, the more trust Google will have in your site.
Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with keywords in it. Try to ensure the links are not obviously “machine generated” ie site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from pages, that in turn, have a lot of links to them (Sony Vaio VGN-FZ18M battery) .
Internally, always cite your other pages by linking to them within text.
Linking to a page with actual key-phrases in the link help a great deal in all search engines when you want to feature for specific key-terms.
I think that Internal Navigation is of paramount importance. Google needs links to find your pages. Don’t underestimate the value of a clever internal link keyword-rich architecture and be sure to understand for instance how many words Google counts in a link (Sony VGN-FZ21M battery) .
Search engines like Google “spider” your entire site by following all the links on your site to new pages, much as a human would click on the links of your pages. This spider is also known as a Robot.
After a while, all your pages are in Google’s index. Ideally you will have unique pages, with unique page titles and unique page descriptions. I don’t worry about meta keywords these days (Sony VGN-FZ150E battery) .
Google chews over your site, analysing text content and links
If you have a lot of duplicate crap found on other websites Google knows about, Google will ignore your page.
You don’t need to keyword stuff your text and look dyslexic to beat the competition. Generally it’s good to have keywords in links, page titles and text content. There is no ideal amount of text – no magic keyword density.
If you link out to irrelevant sites, Google may ignore the page, too (Dell RM791 battery) .
Many SEOs think who you actually link out to (and who links to you) helps determine a topical community of sites in any field, or a hub of authority. Quite simply, you want to be in that hub, at the centre if possible (however unlikely), but at least in it. I like to think of this one as a good thing to remember in the future as search engines get even better at determining topical relevancy of pages (Sony VGP-BPS13 battery) .
Original content is king and will attract a “natural link growth” in Google’s eyes. Too many incoming links too fast might devalue your site.
Rumour has it, Google can devalue whole sites, individual pages, template generated links and individual links if Google deems them “unnecessary”.
Now Google knows who links to you, the “quality” of those links, and who you link to (sony vgp-bpl9 battery) .
It decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can help Google by always linking to your important pages.
It is of paramount importance you spread all that Google juice to your sales keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site pages, so Google does not”demote” starved pages into it’s reserves, or “supplementals”.
Consider linking to important pages on your site from your home page, and via the template navigation on the site (Sony VGP-BPL11 battery) .
How many products do you sell? We sell two. Web Design and SEO. Hmmm. And we are an SEO Company in Scotland. Yes, we have 200 pages on this website, and good placement in Google for hundreds of terms. We make sure we link to these three pages where possible to help search engines figure out “hey, these pages are the most important pages on this site”. The 200 pages on this site, at the moment, are almost all in Google’s main index, but are just introductory pages to our sales page, if we are targeting the right audience (Sony VGP-BPL15 battery) .
If you have a shopping cart, with thousands of products, you need to get as much “Google Juice” or Google Heat to individual “keyword rich” product pages as possible.
With this information, your website has some sort of relevancy score for specific keywords and appears in serps (search engine results pages) when Google users type something into the search box (Dell Inspiron E1505 battery ) .
In the end, getting a site to the top of Google it all comes down do your content and external and internal link profile. All together, Google uses this analysis to determine whether your no1 in Google or number 32, or de-indexed. There’s no magic bullet
At any one time, your site is under some sort of filters designed to keep spam sites out and deliver relevant results to human visitors. One filter may be kicking in keeping a page down in the serps, while another filter is pushing another page up (Dell Latitude E6400 battery) .
You might have poor content but excellent incoming links, or vice versa. Try and identify the reasons Google doesn’t link a particular page. Too few quality incoming links? Too many incoming links? No keyword rich text? Linking out to irrelevant sites? Whatever, fix it (HP Pavilion dv6000 Battery) .
The key to successful seo, I think, is persuading Google that your page is most relevant to any given search query. You do this by good unique keyword rich text content and getting “quality” links to that page. Next time your developing a page, consider what looks spammy to you is probably spammy to Google. Ask yourself which pages on your site are really necessary. Which links are necessary? Which pages are getting the “juice” or “heat“. Which pages would you ignore (Hp Pavilion dv3-1000 battery) ?
You can help a site along in any number of ways (including making sure your page titles and meta tags are unique, or by including H1 tags (etc) where relevant and by emphasising words on pages through the use of bold text.)
I prefer simple seo techniques, and ones that can be measured in some way. I don’t want to just rank for competitive terms, I want to understand the reason why I rank for these terms (Dell Precision M70 Battery) .
At Hobo we try to build sites for humans AND search engines. Make a site relevant to both for success in organic listings and you won’t ever need to get into the really techy side of SEO like redirects and URL rewriting. Of course, to beat the competition in an industry where it’s difficult to attract quality links, you have to get more “technical” sometimes (Acer Aspire One battery) .
There are no hard and fast rules to seo, other than developing quality websites with quality content and quality links pointing to it. You need to mix it up and learn from experience. Remember there are exceptions to nearly every rule, and you probably have little chance determining exactly why you rank in search engines (SONY VGP-BPS8 battery) .
I’ve been doing it for 8 years and everyday I’m trying to better understand Google, to learn more and learn from others’ experiences. It’s important not to obsess about lesser seo specifics unless you really have the time to do so!
There are some things that are apparent though. Don’t build a site in Flash. Don’t build a site with Website Frames. Don’t go mad generating thousands of back links. Don’t hide text. Be creative. KISS – Keep it simple, stupid (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ Battery) .
There you have it, an article about SEO for Google that doesn’t mention PageRank (darn).
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