What is SEO?

For my first post, I thought I would address the first question I receive from anybody when asked, “what do you do, Matt?” As far as I can remember, two people have actually known what SEO is (outside of people in the internet marketing industry)… SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

Wikipedia says 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” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”

So if you’re a cynic, SEO is providing unnatural search results in search engines (specifically Google since they have 87.81% market share as of last year). However, nowadays most webmasters know at least basic SEO, thus if you SEO your website it is simply giving it a polish so it is as presentable as it can be when the search engine comes and finds your site (which it does by sending “crawlers” across the world wide web, analysing each site individually). You could acheive this by doing some of the following:

• Frequently adding new, interesting content
• Ensuring your site is well laid out and easy to navigate
• Changing page titles to something related to the page you are on
• Much more which I will touch on more in my next post

Of course, people abuse SEO with what is called “black-hat” techniques. What is constituted as black-hat SEO is a highly contentious subject with debates raging across the Net. Unfortunately, many of these debates will most likely never be resolved, with Google and other search engine’s so hesitant to reveal how they rank websites and what is monitored. I have tried my share of black-hat (I would argue grey-hat) SEO with mixed results… A few definite black-hat SEO techniques include:

• Keyword Stuffing – filling your site full of keywords but nothing else. Likely to work in 1992…
• Cloaked Text – “hiding” text on your page by putting white text on a white background. Search engines have evolved, don’t do this.
• Doorway Pages – showing the search engine “spider” a different page to what the user see’s. Depends how sneaky you can be…

In my next post I will explain a few basic SEO hints, tips and techniques.

Any questions?