Search engine optimization – black and white
Search engine optimization is about trying to improve your position in the search engine for a specific web page for a given search term.
Many people see Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as something bad. As something done to spam search engine, an annoyance.
It can be.
This type of SEO is often called black hat SEO. Black hat ideas have to change constantly to stay one step ahead of Google and the others. Black hat SEO often uses tools to automate creation of web pages, to create networks of spam sites, to automate commenting on bloggs and forums. Black Hat SEO is probably the reason Google CEO recently called the internet a cesspool and suggested brands to be the solution.
I would stay away from these Black hat ideas. Making people mad at you is good for no one, as a general rule, any web traffic generation idea that is done completely automatic is most probably not good. The search engines are constantly working on finding ways to get rid of this type of bad content. If you use any of these ideas and get removed from the indexes it will be hard or impossible to get back in.
The other type of SEO can be labelled as white hat SEO. Here you try to optimize your content to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find and index your content for the relevant terms.
Between the black and white there is a grey zone. If you have good content and don’t use anything shady you should be safe.
All SEO activities can be grouped into on-page optimization or off-page optimization.
With on-page optimization you improve the content on the page you want to rank in the engines. On-page optimization you should do once and be done with it. Though, it is important that you get these basic things right. When you have completed your page following the simple rules you are generally done with on-page optimizations and can focus on off-page optimizations.
Off-page optimization is about making other pages on the internet help your page to rank well. Search engine takes into account the number of incoming links to your site and how and where the links are.
When Google started out they had an idea and a patent known as page rank. Here is a simplified explanation. Each site on the internet is given a score based on the content on the page. To this score is added the weighted score of all pages linking to the page. When someone is searching the internet this score is part of what determines how the search results are ordered.
Tomorrow I will go through a checklist of what you must do on your page. Until then why don’t you subscribe to my daily traffic tip and get more visitors to your site.
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Comments
Well this idea was what started Google and what made their results better than altavista at that time.
Now the page rank system is just a small part of what makes a page rank, the exact forumla is a well kept secret and a secret that is constantly being updated.
But regardless of the exact method used to order the sites the basic concept still holds, the more people linking to your site the better it is.
Does all search indexes and page ranks work this way or is other competing methods existing?
I would believe that with the number of years that have passed since google invented “the method” someone must take into account rich media quality, time spent on site, weight of site, mobile sites etc.
OR
is it still a “1-person-visiting-1-site-at-a-time” kind of ranking?