What Is SEO?

What Is SEO For Dummies – A Simple Search Engine Optimization Introduction for 2011



What is SEO? For me, search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of getting a website to work better with search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo, and to look for achievable, profitable, ranking opportunities through keyword research. SEO is a quest for increased visibility in search engines via relevant copy, quality links, domain trust, social popularity and search engine connectivity. If you can’t be bothered with that – other stuff works just as well.



Getting (long term) traffic from Google is about KEYWORDS and LINKS. It’s about being relevant enough for a keyword search, and being trusted enough to rank for it. You can be relevant enough with a crap site and an exact match domain, or you can be trusted enough to publish any old sh*t and see it rank above real, quality sites. Alternatively, you can use a bit of brute force and hammer links via article marketing or directory submissions, or you can just throw the rule book out and buy links, overtly or covertly, to get rankings. The latter of course, is against the ‘rules’. But MOST SEO TACTICS still work, on some level, depending on who’s doing them, and how it’s deployed.



You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or Bing, and in 2011, it’s common for the major search engines to find your website pretty easily by themselves within a few days. This is made so much easier if your website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you update content. If you have trouble getting a new site into Google, consider getting some fresh Tweets to your website, and keep an eye out for Googlebot visits.

To stay in Google and other search engines, you you really should consider and largely abide by search engine rules and guidelines for inclusion. With experience, and a lot of observation, you can learn which rules can be bent, and which tactics are short term and perhaps, should be avoided.

It’s thought all search engines rank websites by the quality of incoming links to a site from other websites amongst hundreds of other metrics. Generally speaking, a link from a page to another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page the link points to. The more votes a page gets, the more trusted a page can become, and the higher Google will rank it – in theory. Usually, this is HUGELY affected by how much Google ultimately trusts the DOMAIN the page is on.

I’ve always thought if you are serious about ranking – do so with ORIGINAL COPY. It’s clear – search engines reward good content it hasn’t found before. It indexes it blisteringly fast, for a start. So – make sure each of your pages has content you have written specifically for that page – and you won’t need to jump through hoops to get it ranking.

If you have original quality content on a site, you also have a chance of generating inbound quality links (IBL). If your content is found on other websites, you will find it hard to get links, and it probably will not rank very well as Google favours diversity in it’s results. If you have decent original content on your site, you can let authority websites, those with online business authority, know about it, and they might link to you – the result being a quality IBL.

Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be ignored by search engines (the attribute nofollow effectively cancels out a link, for instance)

Search engines can also find your site by other web sites linking to it. You can also submit your site to search engines direct, but I haven’t submitted my site to a search engine in the last 5 years – you probably don’t need to do that.

Google spiders a link to your home page, finds your site, and crawls and indexes the home page of your site, and will come back to spider the rest of your website if all your pages are linked together.

Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for competitive terms until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in Google. This is the called “the sandbox theory” filters.

I think this depends on the quality of the incoming links Google finds your website by – and even more so in 2011 – the quality of the site itself.

Google WILL classify your site when it crawls and indexes your site – and this classiifcation can have a DRASTIC affect on your rankings – it’s important for Google to work out WHAT YOUR ULTIMATE INTENT IS – do you want to classified as an affiliate site made ‘just for Google’, a domain holding page, or a small business website with a real purpose? Ensure you don’t confuse Google by being explicit with all the signals you can – to show on your website you are a real business, and your INTENT is genuine.

To rank for specific keyword searches, you generally need to have the words on your page (not necessarily altogether, but it helps) – ultimately it is all dependent on the competition for the term you are targeting) or in links pointing to your page/site. Ideally, a mixture of both!

As a result of other quality sites linking to your site, the site now has a certain amount of “Google Juice” (or what I would call “Google Heat(!)” you can share with all the internal pages that make up your website.

Yes, you need to build links to your site to acquire Google Juice. Google is a links based search engine – it does not quite understand ‘good’ content – but it does understand ‘popular’ content.

When you have Google Juice or Heat, try and spread it throughout your site by ensuring all your pages are linked together.

I think your external links to to other sites should probably be on your single pages, the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the higher pages in your site (the home page, your category pages).

It’s not JUST a numbers game. One link from a “trusted authority” site in Google could be all you need. Of course, the more “trusted” links you build, the more trust Google will have in your site. it’s pretty clear that you need MULTIPLE trusted links from MULTIPLE trusted websites to get the most from Google in 2011.

Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with keywords in it – not, for instance, in blogrolls or sitewide links. Try to ensure the links are not obviously “machine generated” ie site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from pages, that in turn, have a lot of links to them.

Internally, consider linking to your other pages by linking to them within text – I usually only do this when it is relevant – and recently, I’ll link to relevant pages when the keyword is in the title elements of both pages. I don’t really go in for auto-generating links at all.

Linking to a page with actual key-phrases in the link help a great deal in all search engines when you want to feature for specific key-terms. ie “seo scotland” as opposed to http://www.hobo-web.co.uk or “click here“.

I think that Internal Navigation is of paramount importance. Google needs links to find your pages if it’s only got it’s crawler to work out what your site is about. Don’t underestimate the value of a clever internal link keyword-rich architecture and be sure to understand for instance how many words Google counts in a link, but don’t overdo it.

Search engines like Google ‘spider’ or ‘crawl’your entire site by following all the links on your site to new pages, much as a human would click on the links of your pages. Google will crawl and index your pages, and within a few days normally, begin to return your pages in search results (SERPS)

After a while, Google will know about your pages, and keep the ones it deems ‘useful’ – pages with original content, or pages with a lot of links to them . Ideally you will have unique pages, with unique page titles and unique page descriptions if you deem to use the latter – most search engines don’t use the meta description when actually ranking your page for specific keyword searches if not relevant – I don’t worry about meta keywords these days.

Google chews over your site, analysing text content and links:

If you have a lot of duplicate crap found on other websites Google knows about, Google will ignore your page.

You don’t need to keyword stuff your text and look dyslexic to beat the competition. Generally it’s good to have keywords in links, page titles and text content. There is no ideal amount of text – no magic keyword density. Keyword stuffing is a tricky business – but even that works, sometimes.

If you link out to irrelevant sites, Google may ignore the page, too – but again, it depends on the site in question. Who you link to, or HOW you link to, REALLY DOES MATTER – I expect Google to use your linking practices as a potential means by which to classify your site.

Many SEOs think who you actually link out to (and who links to you) helps determine a topical community of sites in any field, or a hub of authority. Quite simply, you want to be in that hub, at the centre if possible (however unlikely), but at least in it. I like to think of this one as a good thing to remember in the future as search engines get even better at determining topical relevancy of pages, but I have never really seen any granular ranking benefit (for the page in question) from linking out.

Original content is king and will attract a “natural link growth” in Google’s eyes. Too many incoming links too fast might devalue your site, but again, I’ve not really seen this.I usualy err on the safe side – I go for massive diversity in my links – to make them look more natural.

Rumour has it, Google can devalue whole sites, individual pages, template generated links and individual links if Google deems them “unnecessary”.

Now Google knows who links to you, the “quality” of those links, and who you link to.

It decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can help Google by always linking to your important pages.

It is of paramount importance you spread all that Google juice to your sales keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site pages, so Google does not”demote” starved pages into it’s reserves, or “supplementals”.

Consider linking to important pages on your site from your home page, and via the template navigation on the site.

How many products do you sell? We sell two. Web Design and SEO. Hmmm. And we are an SEO Company in Scotland. Yes, we have 200 pages on this website, and good placement in Google for hundreds of terms. We make sure we link to these three pages where possible to help search engines figure out “hey, these pages are the most important pages on this site”. The 200 pages on this site, at the moment, are almost all in Google’s main index, but are just introductory pages to our sales page, if we are targeting the right audience.

If you have a shopping cart, with thousands of products, you need to get as much “Google Juice” or Google Heat to individual “keyword rich” product pages as possible.

With this information, your website has some sort of relevancy score for specific keywords and appears in serps (search engine results pages) when Google users type something into the search box.



In the end, getting a site to the top of Google it all comes down do your content and external and internal link profile. All together, Google uses this analysis to determine whether your no1 in Google or number 32, or de-indexed. There’s no magic bullet



At any one time, your site is under some sort of filters designed to keep spam sites out and deliver relevant results to human visitors. One filter may be kicking in keeping a page down in the serps, while another filter is pushing another page up. You might have poor content but excellent incoming links, or vice versa. Try and identify the reasons Google doesn’t link a particular page. Too few quality incoming links? Too many incoming links? No keyword rich text? Linking out to irrelevant sites? Whatever, fix it.



The key to successful seo, I think, is persuading Google that your page is most relevant to any given search query. You do this by good unique keyword rich text content and getting “quality” links to that page. Next time your developing a page, consider what looks spammy to you is probably spammy to Google. Ask yourself which pages on your site are really necessary. Which links are necessary? Which pages are getting the “juice” or “heat“. Which pages would you ignore?



You can help a site along in any number of ways (including making sure your page titles and meta tags are unique, or by including H1 tags (etc) where relevant and by emphasising words on pages through the use of bold text.)



I prefer simple seo techniques, and ones that can be measured in some way. I don’t want to just rank for competitive terms, I want to understand the reason why I rank for these terms. At Hobo we try to build sites for humans AND search engines. Make a site relevant to both for success in organic listings and you won’t ever need to get into the really techy side of SEO like redirects and URL rewriting. Of course, to beat the competition in an industry where it’s difficult to attract quality links, you have to get more “technical” sometimes.



There are no hard and fast rules to seo, other than developing quality websites with quality content and quality links pointing to it. You need to mix it up and learn from experience. Remember there are exceptions to nearly every rule, and you probably have little chance determining exactly why you rank in search engines. I’ve been doing it for 8 years and everyday I’m trying to better understand Google, to learn more and learn from others’ experiences. It’s important not to obsess about lesser seo specifics unless you really have the time to do so!



There are some things that are apparent though. Don’t build a site in Flash. Don’t build a site with Website Frames. Don’t go mad generating thousands of back links. Don’t hide text. Be creative. KISS – Keep it simple, stupid.



There you have it, an article about SEO for Google that doesn’t mention PageRank (darn)

( From various sources : Dari berbagai Sumber )



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