Sep
07
2011
kevin.kent
Uncategorized
0
Joel Bockoras
I’ve seen a few articles and blog posts lately that suggest SEO is dead or dying, but I offer a different hypothesis; evolution. For the uninitiated, SEO is a webmaster’s way of telling search engines what they can find on your site, so they can in turn “serve up” your site’s pages in search results. It was, and still is, a competitive way of optimizing your web site, so that it will be seen by those using search engines.
SEO used to be a mysterious player in the world wide web; only a few knew how to harness its power, and they sold their services (along with fantastical promises such as “Your site will be #1 on Google for this or that”) to any site willing to “pay for play”. The problem is, SEO sort of lost its mystery and the more people knew how to use it, the more people abused or “faked” their site’s optimization techniques to artificially enhance the site’s relevance. Google, Yahoo and the rest had to take action to ensure accuracy of their search algorithms, so as not to reward the best “optimized sites” but rather the sites with the best content, matching the key search terms.
Meta-data (data about other data) has long been a hidden cornerstone of web site development. The two most popular examples (and the most abused) are “description” and “keywords”. They are stored on the pages of a web site, but never displayed on the page. Rather, they are intended for those “robots” or “spiders” you have heard about roaming the world wide web. Sure, with today’s technology, the relevance of meta data is weakening, but it’s still part of a well-built web site.
Here are some other elements to consider in a modern SEO plan:
- An .xml sitemap, updated regularly, and submitted to Google sitemaps
- A robots.txt file which also references your sitemap
- A Google analytics (or some form of analytics) account for evaluating the performance of your site’s pages/files/search terms
- Ensure proper use of key HTML elements such as “title” and “alt” tags
- Ensure the pages of your site actually have the “keywords” or search terms in the searchable copy of your content (remember, text is searchable, but images, graphics and flash are not searchable)
- Ensure your page content is written with “the reader” in mind- not a robot/spider
- Promote your site through social media (QR codes, Yelp, FaceBook, Twitter, Vimeo etc…)
- If you have a “bricks and mortar” business, and want people to find you locally, submit your business to Google Places