What The Heck is This SEO Stuff, Anyway?

There are so many people out there that claim to know about Search Engine Optimization and who claim to know what it means to have an SEO-friendly website, it makes one wonder if all of these people really know what the process is all about. Chances are you, the website owner, hired someone with the idea that you were getting great SEO result and found that your results were only mediocre at best.

Oddly enough, it is not just smaller companies that are confused by the entire SEO issue, but larger firms suffer from SEO confusion. Also, higher priced doesn't always mean better service. Shop around and ask the hard questions before hiring an SEO firm.

The thing to remember is that SEO has changed since the beginning. Search engine algorithms have evolved and are far more sophisticated. This evolution means that the guidelines are continually changing.

A New Idea

SEO is a little more than ten years old. In the beginning, webmasters began optimizing sites by submitting a page or two to search engines that would then send out a searchbot or spider to crawl that page, extract links to the other pages in the site and gather the information found on the pages it finds.

The process involved a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server when a second application, known as an indexer, extracts the information found on the pages. The information about the pages, such as the words found on the pages, links, where everything is located on the page, is then placed into a scheduler to be crawled again at a later date.

Early versions of search engine algorithms relied solely on the webmaster providing information through the metatags, or index files. Metatags provided a kind of road map to the page's content. As soon as webmasters realized this was the procedure, it became an unreliable system because webmasters could manipulate keywords and descriptions so that they had nothing at all to do with the actual page content.

Google is Born in 1998

All of this changed when Google arrived on the scene in 1998. Not only was Google's simple page design appealing to Internet users, users liked the off-page factors such as page ranking and the on-page analysis of a website. This eliminated the keyword manipulation that plagued other search engines.

SEO Today

SEO today is improving the volume of website traffic and the quality of visitors to the site via the use of targeted keywords. An SEO expert has to think like their consumer, and they also have to understand how the algorithms work. SEO should involve the site's code, overall design, text-rich content, accurate navigation and eliminate anything that would prevent a spider from crawling the entire site.

In addition to organic searches to the site, a good SEO firm will establish a pay-per-click advertising campaign to boost site visibility. Google considers popularity a major factor when ranking a page.

A well-conceived plan will attack the web from several different angles at the same time. Social networking is an important factor as well as inbound links. The inbound links have to be chosen carefully and have a relationship to the website in some way. Otherwise, Google may consider the site simply a link farm.

Ciniva Systems employees the very best SEO techniques to assist the website owner in achieving as high a ranking as possible.

Karen Vertigan Pope writes for Ciniva Systems, an award winning Virginia web design company. Ciniva specializes in web design and SEO. Ms. Vertigan Pope is the Project Support Manager for Ciniva Systems.