| Search engine optimization (SEO), these days, has evolved to cover many things and it is constantly evolving as the web itself becomes more diverse, more complicated and more interactive. SEO has now become an essential part of operating an online website and whether you need to get more traffic or want to see your website on the top page of Google you either need to know what you are doing in terms of on-page SEO (there is a free SEO eBook available to help you) or you have to hire a professional, which means it’ll cost.
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| Because SEO is an area of activity understood, really well, by few and understood half-well by even fewer it has become that ‘marketing magic’ snake-oil peddlers love, designed to cure all ills everywhere for very little and with hardly any work.
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On-page optimisation used to be the only SEO available (and the only SEO needed) at one stage. We have, since, moved on from the days when SEO was just a few alt tags, some H1 and H2 headers and the correct meta tags. This does not mean, however, that on-page optimization is dead and gone. When performed correctly it helps human visitors to your site determine how relevant your website is to their search queries. It also helps search engines determine both the quality of your listing and (if it is relevant and online visitors click on it) whether it should be higher on the search results pages than it is. |
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| I firmly believe that there should be an underlying logic to every action. This is a deeply held personal philosophy and it has guided me in my activities across the commercial and research sectors as I have helped companies formulate marketing strategies and develop their presence across new product lines. It has also helped me when it comes to creating website content strategies for corporations who need to have a voice across the web.
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| The importance of monitoring your website with the same attention to detail as you would an offline shop cannot be stressed enough. I will use HelpMYSEO as an example because it perfectly illustrates the case. My website has been optimized for keywords such as ‘SEO Help Book’, ‘SEO Help for Google’ and ‘SEO Book best-seller’ which came a little later as ‘SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website on Google’s #1 page’ started to ride high on the Amazon best-seller charts (a position which it has maintained week in, week out, since publication in January 2010). Left to run on autopilot that’s how it would stay. The optimization of HelpMySEO however is based upon my assumptions of what searchers are looking for.
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| As I am writing this the latest Google PageRank (PR) is under way with sites’ PageRank beginning to change right across all the Google data centers. As far as the date is concerned, Google has managed, for once to stick to its schedule of PR updates for 2010. The last one did indeed take place in January as planned and this one is right on cue. |
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As I am writing this it is April’s Fool and I cannot help but reflect how the best joke is played on us on a daily basis by the PageRank perception of a website. To newbies, PageRank (PR) is a vital aspect of SEO because there is still the popular (and misguided) wisdom that a website with a high PageRank (PR) is going to perform better in terms of organic search engine ranking than a website which is lower down the PR food chain. |
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| When corporate giants battle it out for turf it is often felt that commenting on it is either an attempt to ride on their coat tails or a blatant effort to capitalize. Though there is nothing wrong in my book to try and do either the recent news that Google is integrating Flash in its Chrome Browser does have an SEO implication though not quite the one you might expect.
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| Search engine optimization, these days, is an integral part of targeted content production which is also part of content placement all of which require a close integration between what the techies you hired (or outsourced to) do with what the sales department needs to achieve with the company’s aims for the year.
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DMOZ which is also known as ODP, short for Open Directory Project, has been the same for the last 10 years which means that it has become hard to navigate, hard to use and of importance only to webmasters looking to optimize their websites.
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