Seo lesson 1 If you have a website – whether it’s an online store or simply an informational site – you have likely heard about SEO. It’s like high school peer pressure: “everybody’s doing it!” SEO has become the name of the game if you want to enjoy higher rankings in search engines.
Getting people’s attention
Long before there was an internet, people worked hard at getting someone else’s attention. Stores used billboards that were shocking and unusual, television commercials struggled to get and keep the attention of people. Even door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales men would dump dirt on the clean carpets and vacuum it up.
If you run a business you know that there is plenty of competition out there and each one of your competitors is working just as hard as you to get the attention of the consumer. Then the Internet came along and it got a whole lot worse.
History of SEO
In the early days of the Internet, it was mainly used by government, military, and technical types to keep in contact with each other. It didn’t have a real commercial use; it was fairly functional.
Then, as time changed and “regular people” started going onto the internet, it became a tool to communicate and be informed, then it transformed into a place be entertained and to buy things.
Search engines were developed to help people find things. That way, people didn’t have to know the exact URL they wanted to visit before they went online. They could go to a search engine which operated as a central hub and type in their search request. The search engine would find sites related to that search and return them.
To find sites, search engines would send out “robots” or “spiders” which are little programs that crawl through a website and learn everything they can from your content and from the code (which is the part that no one can see but it makes your site function). Then they would report back to the search engine what they’ve discovered on your site and the search engine would then sort you based on what the robots learned. (It sounds very science fiction but it is really quite simple).
When you type into the search line the topic that you’re looking for, the search engine goes through its files and looks for websites related to that topic (as identified by the spiders) and lists them for you. In many cases, search engines list 10 URLs per page and typically those ten become the most clicked URL of all the ones in the search. (People will rarely click past the first 3 or 4 pages of a search if they haven’t yet found what they are looking for; they’ll just go and try a different word to search with). And, the higher on the list you are, the more often you’re clicked. (The 9th URL is clicked more often than the 10th. The 8th is clicked more often than the 9th. The 7th is clicked more often than the 8th, etc.) The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place URLs returned in a search are click many, many more times compared to the ones further down the list.
So, as you can imagine, people sought feverishly to discover how to get onto the first page of a search and (more importantly) how to get in the top 3 spots. To do this, they learned what they could about what spiders and robots looked for and how search engines evaluated websites. When they learned this, they tweaked their websites to be more favorable. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Essentially, it’s the activity of making adjustments in your website to appear higher on search engines.
And it is big business. If you were to Google “SEO” you would find many people claiming to have found the secret to Search Engine Optimization, promising higher clicks to people who buy their programs. The reality is that each search engine uses a variety of things to determine how it ranks websites.
Individually, each factor used by the search engines may not mean much, but when put together in a calculation (an “algorithm”) the search engines wield a lot of power over where they think your website falls in the big scheme of things.
So what are the factors? Most of the search engines keep their algorithm a secret now.
Not too long ago, it was common knowledge about what made a website popular on the Internet. It was a combination of such things as meta tags (which are lines of code) and keywords on your website.
But unethical website owners, desperate to get ranked higher, took advantage of the algorithm’s factors and would do things like “keyword stuffing” to get ranked higher. Keyword stuffing is when they would fill their pages with keywords. It was incoherent to people. Sometimes, in order to appear more legitimate to the people who would be shopping at their site, they would change the font color of their keyword lists to match the background of their website, thus making them invisible. There are many unethical methods to accomplish this but there are many ethical methods as well. Search engines work hard to uncover the unethical methods and then build their search programs in a way to avoid ranking those unethical methods.
The Problem with SEO
The problem that users have encountered with SEO over the years is this: When one of the important factors in the algorithm becomes common knowledge, website owners put a lot of effort into their website to shape their site to comply with that factor (like keyword stuffing, for example). Unfortunately, that means that those websites are trading position on a search result for something else: they are trading position for usability. If you are a retailer and you are eager for the top spot, please heed our advice: loading up your site with one or two of the SEO strategies can only get you so far. When you do that, you’ll often make your site less readable and enjoyable for your viewers.
So, you may get a higher ranking, but you are not longer selling people your product nearly as well, for example. In upcoming lessons we’ll talk more about this problem and how to avoid it. It is very common today with keyword densities.
Why do search engines rank sites anyway? What are they trying to achieve?
Relevance
In the early days of popular internet usage, search engines were filling their sites with banners and information and were trying to become “lifestyle portals” to help people live their lives (with calendars and email and file storage). Look at www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com to see what we mean. Among the small fry in those early days, Google was slightly different. Their home page was simple. And it remains so today (www.google.com).
So how is it that Google became so popular with such a simple site? Google was ignoring the many other freebies offered by the other search engines in favor of finding the perfect algorithm. They wanted searches to be relevant.
Relevance means that when you type the word “car” into a search engine, you get back sites that are about cars. They don’t want to offer you search results with sites that sometimes contain a picture of someone’s favorite car, or a dealership selling used cars, or a site about auto insurance. All of these sites would mention “car” on them but may not be what you’re looking for.
Instead, a relevant search means that a search engine will return sites to you ranked in order of how much they are about cars. They don’t just rank them by keywords anymore (so those keywords stuffers won’t mess things up). Instead, they use a number of factors in a complex and secret algorithm to determine how relevant a website is to the words it uses on its site (and thus, how relevant it can be to you when you search for those words).
Although some retailers hate SEO because it means a lot of extra work for them, consumers should love it. Internet users should be glad that strict and improving SEO guidelines are in place because they can then have the assurance that their searches will only return the kinds of things they want to know.
Summary
The internet has come a long way! It’s here to stay and it’s always changing and fluctuating. If you own a website you’ll want to have your site appear high on a search. In the next lessons you’ll learn some good, smart ways to do that… without trading the readability and usability of your site.
Search Engine Optimization
