Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the Safe Way by John V. W. Howe
To start this article, let's make certain that everyone knows what a search
engine (SE) is. This is a website that will accept an input word or phrase and
search a database to give you information that matches the input information
that you supplied to it. The best known SE's are Google and Yahoo.
There are many definitions for SEO so we will try to boil them down into a
simple one. The condensed definition of SEO is -- the action of using
techniques to make your page(s) appeal to search engines so they will rank the
page high in the search engine results pages (SERP). For additional
definitions, run a Google search to get plenty of reading on the subject.
Why be concerned about the SERP ranking? This is what produces the free traffic
to your site. These people found you all by themselves using the SE and they
arrive at your site open to read what you have to present. They are not
suspicious as they would be if they arrived at your site by clicking on a
banner ad or on a Google Adwords or Adsense ad. This traffic is the life blood
of your business. Readers who arrive at your site by a search engine are much
easier to sell than those who come from pay per click or banner ads.
SEO has created the profession of search engine optimizer. This profession
breaks down into two groups called the white hats and the black hats. (From the
old western movies where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore
black hats). The white hats work to create good, solid content that the SE's
are looking for. Their form of optimization is presenting the good, solid
material in a format which appeals to the SE.
The black hats try to trick the SE into thinking that a site has valuable
information on it by various methods and tricks. When search engines (SE's)
first came on the scene, they were not very sophisticated and people on the Net
found ways to easily trick them into giving a page a higher ranking on the SERP
than the page deserved.
An early black hat trick was to fill in all the white space on the page with
the page keyword in white font color (white letters on a white background). If
the page was viewed on the screen, it looked normal with five or six keyword
occurrences, but if you looked at the HTML, you would see the keyword on the
page say 300 times. This was called "increasing keyword density" and this
worked for a short time until the SE's got smarter. When they learned to look
at the background color and the font color for these 300 keywords, the SE's
started penalizing those website for cheating. The interaction between the
black hat SEO's and the search engines has developed into a "cat and mouse"
game and is still on going.
Google has some of the best minds on the Net working for it and those minds are
constantly working to stay ahead of the "black hats". It is not uncommon for a
"black hat" page to be ranked well in the SERP's one day and gone the next.
This is because Google has changed its algorithm for what it considers relevant
on the page. The black hat tricks that worked yesterday were discovered and the
page is gone from Google or ranked so far back in the SERP that it is "dead
meat". Google has a goal to rank pages with outstanding, relevant content high
on the SERP. If you create that outstanding, relevant content and develop
traffic, your page will rise in the SERP rank. You are not trying to fool
Google, you are building what Google wants.
I learned this information from using Site Build It (SBI) since it guides you
through this part of building your page. Each time you create a page, you first
preview it to see that it meets your visual requirements. Then you submit it to
"Analyze It" a program that evaluates the page. Once it has completed its
evaluation, it tells you what it detected that needs to be changed to make the
page more acceptable to search engine spiders.
Make the changes to the page and resubmit to "Analyze It" until it gives you a
report with no more suggestions. At that point, you preview the page to make
certain your changes have not affected the visual presentation and it is ready
to publish.
The following are a few guidelines what I learned from building my Site.
If you follow these guidelines, you will build a page that is structured the
way the SE's like.
1. The web page file name should contain the primary keyword. For retirement
jobs online.com this would be "retirement-jobs-online.com/keyword.html.
2. The page title should contain the primary keyword. This is the Title tag in
the HTML code.
3. The page description should contain the primary keyword. This is the
description meta tag.
4. The keyword list should begin with the primary keyword. This is the keywords
meta tag.
5. The first heading in the body should contain the primary keyword. This will
be the H1, H2, or H3 tags in HTML. "H" tags indicate a heading which will be
bold font. The 1, 2, or 3 indicate the size of the font for the heading.
6. The keyword should appear in the first 90 visible characters of the text.
7. The key word should appear a moderate number of times in the body. Here is
where it gets a little fuzzy. Too few occurrences will not help you and too
many occurrences can be considered "keyword spamming". I do not know the exact
formula, I just do what SBI says. Quite often "Analyze It" tells me to lower
the occurrences of keywords on a page.
8. The keyword should appear in the text of a text link on the page. If you
build your own website, you will need to know HTML so you can fill in the meta
tags for the title, keywords, and description. This is not hard to do and you
can learn it without too much trouble. If you use SBI, you fill in text boxes
in the SBI template and SBI writes the HTML to accomplish this. If you are
using MS Internet Explorer, to see the HTML for these inputs, go to
Profit Online Today.com
and right click in the center of the page. Click View Source in the dropdown
box and a Notepad window will open with the HTML code for the page. Here is
what you will see near the top:
Profit Online Today provides Home business Opportunities and Free Resource to
help you build a successful money making website.
About the Author
John V. W. Howe is an entrepreneur, author, inventor, patent holder, husband,
father, and grandfather. He has been involved in entrepreneurial activities for
over 40 years.
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