Understanding What SEO Is – And What It Isn’t
What is It?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (”organic”) search results as opposed to paid search engine placement.
There are a number of factors that impact search engine optimization. The most key thing to remember is that the search engines want pages with useful, relevant content that will be easy for a human reader to use. You may have read some books or attended a seminar about SEO and heard about different things you can do to increase your page ranking. We want to help you develop a good SEO Strategy – and equally important, avoid a bad one.
There is no “quick” way to accomplish a good search engine presence. It’s normal to want to know how to have your site on the first page in Google by next week, and good SEO can’t provide that. Good SEO represents an investment of time, patience and effort, but it pays off just like any sound, long-term business strategy. Bad SEO might get you to the top of the heap faster, but it not only won’t keep them there – it can bring you back down just as fast. Bad SEO is more effort in the long run because you have to keep trying new things. Good SEO get you there slower, but it keeps you there longer with less effort once you arrive.
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Right vs. Wrong
—There are two kinds of SEO: Black hat & White hat. Let’s look at the difference…
Black hat SEO utilizes unethical methods such as link farms, keyword spamming or stuffing, and content duplication to artificially inflate search engine placement. There is one very important thing to remember with these techniques: They do not work over the long term. Even if they show modest results in the short term, the search engines will always catch on to them. Sites which use these techniques nearly always end up being blacklisted – that is, removed from organic search results. Black hat SEO can also involve techniques were once considered “legitimate” and no longer are. You should definitely avoid these types of techniques.
White hat SEO on the other hand, is defined as ethical techniques which conform to a search engine provider’s guidelines, and which involve no deception. There is no specific rule-set for good SEO. The more accessible and reachable your website is to a live human being, the better it will rank on a search engine. Search engines specifically want to catalog pages that humans will use. Therefore, the best things that you can do for your search engine placement is to your site content: clear, accessible, relevant and up to date.
It is never necessary to fool or trick a search engine to obtain better placement, and attempts to do so will eventually result in your site being down ranked or even banned from the search engine.
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Good Basics
—Let’s start by looking at the basics. The core functions driving search engine ranking are Content Relevance & Site Popularity.
Content Relevance is known as content that is viewable by the search engine. You as the creator of your website determine the depth and quality of your content through the addition of your content – your text and images – to your website.
You’ve likely heard that Flash isn’t SEO friendly. There’s some truth to that statement. Flash-only websites by themselves don’t have as much content depth as HTML websites as a general rule, so they have less content relevance. Flash-only sites are searchable on a superficial level – the domain name and the Meta data is searchable, but the flash object is not readable by the search engine spiders and does not contribute to content depth. Google is making some progress on being able to read the contents of a Flash file, but at this time HTML is still more “search engine friendly”.
HTML websites have higher relevancy because they support more data. In addition to the domain name and meta data, HTML pages have data-rich text content and the site tree is readable to the search engines. This makes HTML easier to categorize from a search engine perspective. PhotoBiz has several tools available to help you increase the content relevancy of your Flash website.
Site Popularity deals with the amount of traffic to your website. Site popularity can involve methods that are not specific to SEO but which are valuable marketing strategies from a business perspective involving your website. Some examples of methods of increasing site popularity:
- Public Relations – creating press releases or articles that generate interest in your work and your website.
- Email campaigns – good, relevant email marketing such as email newsletters, focused toward people who actively want to receive them.
- Word of mouth is the strongest way to increase site popularity. These days, word of mouth can include forums and social media as well as face to face contact.
- Inbound links from relevant, high-traffic sites provide both accessibility and popularity for your website. Reciprocal links carry less weight, but do help particularly when they are with other relevant, high-traffic sites.
Search Engine Optimization is only one part of a total business marketing plan and should only make up about 5%-10% of a marketing strategy. Building good site popularity does help with your SEO, but the value of it reaches beyond just your search engine presence.
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In Summary…
What SEO Is: SEO is a way to improve your site’s find ability. SEO is supportive of relevant content that is readable and accessible to real humans.
What SEO Is Not: SEO is not a way to fool or trick search engines into placing your site higher. Consistently, time and time again the sites that stay in the top of their keyword rankings are sites that have relevant information, appropriate cross-links and are easy to find.
What’s Coming Next: We’ll look at your Meta tags, what they do and don’t do for you, and how to write good Meta tags that support your SEO.
