What Is Search Engine Optimization

search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of getting a website to work better with search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo, and to look for achievable, ranking opportunities through keyword research. SEO is a quest for increased visibility in search engines via relevant copy, quality links, domain trust, social popularity and search engine connectivity. If you can’t be bothered with that – other stuff works just as well.

Getting long term traffic from Google is about KEYWORDS . It’s about being relevant enough for a keyword search, and being trusted enough to rank for it. You can be relevant enough with a crap site and an exact match domain, or you can be trusted enough to publish any old sh*t and see it rank above real, quality sites. Alternatively, you can use a bit of brute force and hammer links via article marketing or directory submissions, or you can just throw the rule book out and buy links, overtly or covertly, to get rankings. The latter of course, is against the ‘rules’. But MOST SEO TACTICS still work, on some level, depending on who’s doing them, and how it’s deployed.You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or Bing,  in 2011, it is common for the major search engines to find your website  easily by themselves within a few days. This is made so much easier if your website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you update content. If you have trouble getting a new site into Google, consider getting some fresh Tweets to your website, and keep an eye out for Googlebot visits.

• To stay in Google and other search engines, you you really should consider and largely abide by search engine rules and guidelines for inclusion. With experience, and a lot of observation, you can learn which rules can be bent, and which tactics are short term and perhaps, should be avoided.
• It’s thought all search engines rank websites by the quality of incoming links to a site from other websites amongst 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. The more votes a page gets, the more trusted a page can become, and the higher Google will rank it – in theory. Usually, this is HUGELY affected by how much Google ultimately trusts the DOMAIN the page is on.
• I’ve always thought if you are serious about ranking – do so with ORIGINAL COPY. It’s clear – search engines reward good content it hasn’t found before. It indexes it blisteringly fast, for a start. So – make sure each of your pages has content you have written specifically for that page – and you won’t need to jump through hoops to get it ranking.
• If you have original quality content on a site, you also have a chance of generating inbound quality links (IBL). If your content is found on other websites, you will find it hard to get links, and it probably will not rank very well as Google favours diversity in it’s results. 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.
• Search engines can also 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 – you probably don’t need to do that.
• Google spiders a link to your home page, finds your site, and crawls 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.
    • I think this depends on the quality of the incoming links Google finds your website by – and even more so in 2011 – the quality of the site itself.
    • Google WILL classify your site when it crawls and indexes your site – and this classiifcation can have a DRASTIC affect on your rankings – it’s important for Google to work out WHAT YOUR ULTIMATE INTENT IS – do you want to classified as an affiliate site made ‘just for Google’, a domain holding page, or a small business website with a real purpose? Ensure you don’t confuse Google by being explicit with all the signals you can – to show on your website you are a real business, and your INTENT is genuine.
    • To rank for specific keyword searches, you generally need to have the words on your page (not necessarily altogether, but it helps) – ultimately it is all dependent on the competition for the term you are targeting) or in links pointing to your page/site. Ideally, a mixture of both!
• As a result of other quality 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.
  • Yes, you need to build links to your site to acquire Google Juice. Google is a links based search engine – it does not quite understand ‘good’ content – but it does understand ‘popular’ content.
  • When you have Google Juice or Heat, try and spread it throughout your site by ensuring all your pages are linked together.
    • 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).