Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the Safe Way by John V. W. Howe
The best and safest way to optimize your site for search engines is to create a
website full of solid content. Trying SEO tricks to fool the search engines may
work in the short term, but will cause you problems in the long term.
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
retirement jobs online.com on Site Build It. 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 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
www.retirement-jobs-online.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:
<xmp><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
Transitional//EN"></xmp><xmp><HTML></xmp>
<xmp><HEAD></xmp><xmp><TITLE>Retirement Jobs
Online - retirement jobs online for people over 50</TITLE></xmp>
<xmp><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"
href="http://retirement-jobs-online.com/retirement-jobs-online.xml"></xmp>
<xmp><META Name="Description" Content="Retirement jobs online for
retirees seeking flexible work schedules"></xmp> <xmp><META
Name="Keywords" Content="retirement jobs online, retirement careers,
entrepreneur, part time, retiree, retired"></xmp> The
<xmp><TITLE></xmp> tag is the page title. The <xmp>
Name="Description" Content= is the description. </xmp> The
<xmp><META Name="Keywords" Content= is the keyword list. </xmp>
You can write this HTML if you just use the tags exactly like they appear ABOVE
and insert your text between the quotation marks. Enough HTML lesson! The
intent was to show you where these various inputs appeared on the page. If you
build your own website, do not forget to fill these out each time you build a
page. In summary, do not chase after the latest "hot" SEO technique. Focus on
creating solid content and follow a few rules on how to structure your page and
no matter how Google changes its SE algorithm, your pages should continue to
rank well. Good luck with your future online endeavors.
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. He has founded www.boomer-ezine.com,
www.retirement-jobs-online.com
and www.boomer-entrepreneur.com
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