SEO Basics

2009-11-14 by Nathan (0 comments)

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What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the technique that improves the amount of traffic your website generates. The more people visit your webisite (and return on a frequent basis), the more your monthly website traffic volume goes up and the better you rank on Google and other search engines. There are many approaches to improving the ranking of your website, un-paid (natural, organic or algorithmic) and paid SEO are the most typical advertised SEO techniques.

While un-paid SEO for some niche businesses does the trick in gaining good web ranking, the paid SEO is usually the best option for companies that are entering a well established market or want to gain the edge over their competitors. There are many companies claiming to guarantee you the first page of Google, even if you are having a small flash website that is totally not optimized and good for the web...

The first rule of SEO is to try and understand the way search engines work and using this knowlegde to build a website that is structured according to those rules. While it seems like a very simple job, creating an SEO optimized site is not all that easy, following the hierarchy of html tags and using them where they should be used, employing relevant keywords and adding / editing the website in a manner that keeps in line with the keywords you gave it requires skill, on top of that... you have to remember surfers do not read but scan web pages!

White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is what you should be aiming for... SEO friendly source code is the biggest contributor to good ranking. Menus, titles, image alts, the use of keywords in internet optimized webtext contribute to search engine spiders being able to find what they need. It is also always a good thing to back the web site with an extra dose of white hat SEO like inbound links, frequent relevant site updates, and perhaps even reciprocal linking, the latter will need budget most of the times.

Black Hat SEO

White hat's evil brother is black hat SEO... While keyword stuffing, link farms, article spinning and spam indexing might get you a good rank in days, there are rarely cases that get away with it, black hat SEO will get you banned from search engines and once banned you can forget about a good ranking. Besides getting banned those techniques actually degrade the relevance of your seach results and the user experience so much that your site gives a cheap and broken impression to your customers.

In conclusion...

1. Watch out when SEO company X explains to you they can get your company ranked #1 on Google or Baidu in less as a month and inquire about what methods that company is using.
2. You can contact Petralian for SEO related services, we can take on your SEO proposal or forward you to our trusted SEO partner depending on your project size.

Wikipedia on SEO
Google on SEO
Google SEO Starters Guide (PDF)