Search Engine Optimization – Going Back to the Basics
Sunday, December 27th, 2009
Richard M. Gilmore asked:
If you go to any SEO or webmaster related forum you’ll see that they are full of ‘SEO experts’ of al sorts and fashions asking same newbie questions. First you think it’s quite entertaining watching people calling themselves SEO experts rambling about basic stuff and having no clue as to what Google Page Rank actually is. They ask you how they can improve their search engine ranking in one thread and offer quality SEO services in another.
I tend to believe that quite a large part of these self-proclaimed SEO experts are not as SEO illiterate as they claim to be. They’re simply after some quick signature links. But then again there really are SEOs out there who really don’t know pretty much anything about what they do. It’s ok if you’re optimizing your own site. We all were just starting at some point and knew little about what we were doing. But if you offer to optimize sites for money and have almost no idea of what this is all about then it’s quite a different thing. So here we go, back to the search engine optimization basics once again for all the SEO specialists out there throwing questions about page rank and article directories on SEO forums and online marketing communities.
Search engine optimization or SEO for short is the process of tweaking websites in a way that will make them appear high in the search results for specific search terms known as keywords. All optimization activities can be broken down into to broad groups: onpage (stuff you do on your website) and off-page (things you do to promote your website on the rest of the web).
The first thing one needs to understand when dipping the toe into the SEO waters is that search engines rank web pages and not websites. That means that you don’t optimize your website but you optimize each page individually. This may seem as a lot of work and it actually is, but there’s no other way out. And if you think about it, this approach gives you a lot of advantages you’ll see that yourself: you can target specific groups of visitors and send them to the webpages that best reflect their needs and wants. Instead of simply sending everyone to the same landing page you can tweak the copy and design of every destination for each keyword or group of keywords and achieve higher conversion rate.
Here’s another point where a lot of beginner SEO tend to go wrong: identifying the goals of SEO campaign. This is the first and one of the most important stages of SEO. First of all you need to think about what you want to achieve with your SEO. For many people (for too many actually) SEO is largely about increasing the page rank, while it’s actually not. Page rank is just one of the many ranking factors and by no means the most important one. There are lots of low PR web pages that rank well for rather competitive keywords. Moreover, the Page Rank you see on the Google PR toolbar has nothing to do with the real PR value. The toolbar PageRank is designed to entertain webmasters and give them some sort of metrics they can monitor (we all like stats, don’t we?). The goal of SEO is not the page rank but top positions in the search results for relative keywords. Once you realize that you can stop worrying about your PageRank and concentrate on actually optimizing your website.
Top search engine optimization
If you go to any SEO or webmaster related forum you’ll see that they are full of ‘SEO experts’ of al sorts and fashions asking same newbie questions. First you think it’s quite entertaining watching people calling themselves SEO experts rambling about basic stuff and having no clue as to what Google Page Rank actually is. They ask you how they can improve their search engine ranking in one thread and offer quality SEO services in another.
I tend to believe that quite a large part of these self-proclaimed SEO experts are not as SEO illiterate as they claim to be. They’re simply after some quick signature links. But then again there really are SEOs out there who really don’t know pretty much anything about what they do. It’s ok if you’re optimizing your own site. We all were just starting at some point and knew little about what we were doing. But if you offer to optimize sites for money and have almost no idea of what this is all about then it’s quite a different thing. So here we go, back to the search engine optimization basics once again for all the SEO specialists out there throwing questions about page rank and article directories on SEO forums and online marketing communities.
Search engine optimization or SEO for short is the process of tweaking websites in a way that will make them appear high in the search results for specific search terms known as keywords. All optimization activities can be broken down into to broad groups: onpage (stuff you do on your website) and off-page (things you do to promote your website on the rest of the web).
The first thing one needs to understand when dipping the toe into the SEO waters is that search engines rank web pages and not websites. That means that you don’t optimize your website but you optimize each page individually. This may seem as a lot of work and it actually is, but there’s no other way out. And if you think about it, this approach gives you a lot of advantages you’ll see that yourself: you can target specific groups of visitors and send them to the webpages that best reflect their needs and wants. Instead of simply sending everyone to the same landing page you can tweak the copy and design of every destination for each keyword or group of keywords and achieve higher conversion rate.
Here’s another point where a lot of beginner SEO tend to go wrong: identifying the goals of SEO campaign. This is the first and one of the most important stages of SEO. First of all you need to think about what you want to achieve with your SEO. For many people (for too many actually) SEO is largely about increasing the page rank, while it’s actually not. Page rank is just one of the many ranking factors and by no means the most important one. There are lots of low PR web pages that rank well for rather competitive keywords. Moreover, the Page Rank you see on the Google PR toolbar has nothing to do with the real PR value. The toolbar PageRank is designed to entertain webmasters and give them some sort of metrics they can monitor (we all like stats, don’t we?). The goal of SEO is not the page rank but top positions in the search results for relative keywords. Once you realize that you can stop worrying about your PageRank and concentrate on actually optimizing your website.
Top search engine optimization
