Like Classic Paintings SEO is a Combination of Efforts
Friday, August 8th, 2008I’ll repeat that … Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art form, it’s not a programming language or coding method. I like to think of SEO as an orchestra. The drum, tuba, clarinet and all the rest of the instruments may sound nice when played by themselves, but sound really GREAT when they all play together in an orchestrated manner. SEO is much the same … there are certain pieces of the puzzle that you work to improve on, and when they all come together, you have an optimized website.
If you were to ask me what to do first, I would probably say that your should learn something about SEO and optimization before you build your site. Since you probably already have a site, this is a moot subject. What you will need to do is learn the SEO techniques and then apply them to your site by making changes to it.
It will be of great benefit to you if you learn some good solid SEO skills before you start making changes to your site. If you simply start making changes you will not know why your listings may change, if they do. An often made mistake is keyword stuffing or over using important techniques like H1 tags and so on.
Something to avoid is overuse of your keywords. It happens all the time too. People just don’t understand the history behind the spider spamming and think that more is better. 50 keywords on your page will probably get you banned for that keyword. Five on the page may well get you listed high for it. Algorithms are always changing and there really is no one keyword density for any given page. This is something that has roots in all the other facets of your page, everything else that is there, and where any given keyword appears, whether it’s in heading tags, or just text. Get lots of inbound links.
SEO is common sense, but it is even more than that. It is understanding how different html tags works together, and how the search engines will perceive that. It is a lot of trial and error which will, in the end, lead you to good solid and proper optimization techniques. All of this will lead you to better search engine rankings.
The one thing that will make your business profitable is getting listings on the top of the results pages. This is called “above the fold”, the part of the search engines results page (SERP) that displays WITHOUT scrolling.
You will get 99% of your traffic from Google, MSN and Yahoo! No doubt about that. You need to optimize your site for these engines. By this I mean take each page of your site and optimize each part of the page for these engines.
The main items that you will want to work on to get optimized are the title tag, the meta description tag, the meta keywords tag, code attributes like alt=, title=, summary=, H1 and H2 tags, and possibly the H3 tag, keyword density, navigation and/or ease of navigation and anchor text and internal linking are all among the main things to work on for on-site optimization.
