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Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the how-to-until-search-engines-change-next-week dept.

isharq writes to tell us that SEOmoz has an interesting writeup regarding search engine optimization. The article has quite a bit of info and is geared so that even the inexperienced used can learn the basics of search engine optimization. From the article: "It is our goal to improve your ability to drive search traffic to your site and debunk major myths about SEO. We share this knowledge to help businesses, government, educational and non-profit organizations benefit from being listed in the major search engines."

6 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. SEO is BSEO by rakerman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    SEO is bullshit.
    I rank #1, or in top 5 on Google for lots of things, and all I did was write about stuff that interested me.

    1. Re:SEO is BSEO by flood6 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Anybody can rank #1 in Google for "purple flying widgets", but it doesn't matter because no one searches for that. Getting clients to rank well for things like "home stereo" or "linux webhost" is where the challenge is; hardly "bullshit".

      I didn't RTFA, but from the comments it sounds like I've read hundreds like it and it's preaching the "content is king" dogma. And that's pretty true. All you have to do is build a good site that people want to visit and you're halfway there. Unfortunately people just try to build a site with the "coolest" flash and spend time and money on the latest SE spam techniques.

      So I agree with rakerman in that building a site on a topic you enjoy with interesting content is half the battle. You keep up with it, update it, and people will naturally link to it (links being the other half).

      SEO actually seems to be getting easier in a sense. The complicated cloaking and doorway pages are much less effective on the major keyphrases than they used to be. You'll still see plenty of scrapper sites rank high in the major SEs, but the trend is against them.

      --
      SEO Firefox Extension
  2. Re:fundamental by SpecBear · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Absolutely correct.

    You don't have to optimize if you're relevant, and if you're not relevant then you're fighting a losing battle. Google employs thousands of people and spends assloads of money to make sure the search engine continues to give good results. Google wants to be the top choice for search, and to do that they need to make sure that when somebody searches for "widget," they get sites most relevant to "widget."

    If you've got the spiffiest widget site on the net, then you don't have to optimize for Google because Google is optimizing for you. And they're better at it than you are. It's their business to make sure people get to your site when they're looking for info on widgets.

    If your widget site sucks and you manage to optimize your page to get a higher search ranking, then people are going to be annoyed when they search for widgets and your crappy site comes up. Google will see this as a bug in the search engine, and eventually it'll be fixed. Now you're working against Google's dev team. Good luck with that.

  3. Knowledge of PageRank isn't enough by GuyMannDude · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you want to figure out how to boost your ratings, why not get the advice from the horse's mouth?

    Brin and Page's original paper about PageRank (Google) : the original Google paper

    Another PageRank paper Inside PageRank

    The problem is that PageRank isn't the end-all-and-be-all of Google. Allow me to quote from this SIAM News article

    While Google relies heavily on PageRank for ranking its search results, it uses at least a hundred other metrics as well, making use of such things as the content of "anchor text," the highlighted description a user clicks on to follow a link. Such methods are powerful heuristics for sharpening the relevance of link analysis, but they also leave Google more vulnerable to spammers. A search on the term "miserable failure," for instance, returns a Web page about George Bush as the top result, a type of mischief known as "Google bombing." To help thwart spammers, Google keeps its exact ranking methods secret and changes them frequently.

    Any doofus can look up the details of PageRank; therefore, that information is useless if you want to do better than everyone else. Trying to figure out those "hundred other metrics" is where SEO comes in. Trying to discern hidden logic is a tough problem and that's why those SEO companies can charge an arm and a leg. I have been told that the mathematics involved in SEO algorithms is non-trival.

    GMD

    --
    watch this
  4. The best way to make money with SEO... by aquarian · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...is to run websites and/or give lectures on how to make money with SEO. It's sorta like no-money-down real estate infomercials...

  5. Re:fundamental by slackmaster2000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I agree with you to some degree, but you're not entirely correct IMO.

    An example: I manage one particular corporate website where the content couldn't be any more relevant. Nothing spammy or light-weight about it really - no tricks. Prior to my "optimization", the site was a page or two back on google for several very important key-phrases. After optimization, the site rose to the first page. I was able to achieve this without cheating, but simply being a little smarter about how the page was coded...paying more attention to tags and page titles. The content isn't any "better" now for the end user, nor is it any worse, but google and the other major engines like it more. Due to the unique nature of the content of this site, it's extremely likely that a person searching for these key-phrases would be looking for this very content, so I didn't do anything annoying either.

    It's also important to me that I didn't have to reword the copy of the site to the point where it read poorly. "Here is some information about KEYWORD. KEYWORD is very important. If you want to know about KEYWORD, then this is the place to be for information regarding KEYWORD. That's because we specialize in KEYWORD. If you have any question about KEYWORD, please ask and we'll answer your KEYWORD questions." :)

    Anyhow, I do agree with you that optimization, if done poorly and/or excessively, can be bad for both the users who find the content relevant, and people searching for something a little different.

    Regarding the content of TFA, I found it to be a very nice overview with enough detail to be effective. It's pretty comprehensive compared to a lot of SEO articles online.