Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization

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."

Comments

fundamental

[TedCheshireAcad]

Step 1: Write better content.

seriously.

Re:fundamental

[Yjerkle]

Step 1: Write better content.

No kidding. My website, Gullible.Info, is the #1 google result for "gullible", and we didn't do any of this "search engine optimization" stuff. We just wrote amusing stuff, and people linked to us.

Re:fundamental

[BarryLoper]

I think history has shown that "better content" has little to do with search engine ranking. You just have to know how to work the system better than your competitor.

Having said that, I wish someone would invent a search engine that would push some of this "better content" to the top of search engine results.

Re:fundamental

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you know that the world 'gullible' isn't indexed by Google?

Re:fundamental

[SpecBear]

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.

Re:fundamental

[slackmaster2000]

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.

This post is optimized

[77Punker]

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77Punker.com
Your #1 search source!

Absolutely

[conJunk]

Step 1: Write better content.

That's in there. I think it's page four of TFA. They hit all the key points:

Accessiblity
Valid HTML/CSS
Good, Well written content

This article seems to know what it's talking about, and doubles as a decent guide to good web design principle. Awesome.

similar article by seomoz

[QuakerOatmeal]

These guys wrote a search ranking factors article a month or two ago that is also a worthy read.

Easy

[rbinns]

Content, Content, Content... And a little help for the search engines such as ALT tags and relevant TITLE tags. When setting up pages, I often look at the page in Lynx to see what the crawler should see. After all, it is a little hard for the search engine to describe an image without any tag data. Unless, of course, you are amazon and you have a turk at your disposal. Amazon's Mechanical Turk

You forgot META tags!

[MillionthMonkey]

<meta http-equiv="Keywords" name="Keywords" content="lol this is not a search engine optimization">

26 steps guide, recommended reading

[mcguyver]

Another good resource is this old but still very applicable guide, 26 steps to 15k a Day.

SEO

[boingyzain]

If you're interested in Search Engine Optimization, the tool can be used like the Overture Keyword Selector Tool. Similar results are obtained with both, which is interesting all in itself. A guy built an interface similar to Overture to use with Google Suggest.

Other than that I can't think of a real use... I usually know what I want to search for on Google. It could help optimize queries I guess (see the "number" of results before hitting submit, but not the quality...)

Happy Holidays to all Slashdotters, by the way :)

rule #1

[circletimessquare]

rule #1 for search engine optimization:

write an article and submit it to slashdot. once on slashdot, it will rank higher on google.

SEO is BSEO

[rakerman]

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.

Re:SEO is BSEO

[nb caffeine]

my website is #1 on google for "nonsensical paragraphs of poorly written prose"

Pretty damn good description of my site too :)

Re:SEO is BSEO

[flood6]

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.

Well..

[Sv-Manowar]

The problem is that the SEO spammers reset the game for the rest of the people over time by flooding out the methods that people can used to get ranked with their crap, meaning everyone has to keep changing to stay ahead, and obviously the way to do this is fresh, good quality, unique content. That's not to say that SEO spammers won't eventually see this and begin stealing/outsourcing content production in order to screw this up too

Nevermind the META tags!

[Nik13]

Meta tags is still part of the very basic stuff that everyone already knows (hardly worth mentionning). In fact, too much people worry only about that. Worrying about meta tags before ensuring their content is good enough or that it can be indexed easily (especially if they use frames)! And when that proves to be insufficient, they hire some SEO-"guru", often the shady/not-so-ethical kind that makes pages with nothing but keywords (doorway pages) and such. Meta tags are so over-abused that search engines almost disregard them, they're just not THAT important anymore.

Often overlooked are small things like page titles, having your keywords in the article/page itself and perhaps in the URL (rewriting can come in handy), regular content updates, clean/semantic/valid/accessible markup - and use CSS (content to markup ratio helps), good links (in/out), etc.

SEO is easy for the most part. I've brought up the ranking of several sites rather easily - mostly by looking at the top results for the keywords we'd like to be found under and our main competitors... Find out what they do better/why they come ahead of you, and make up a strategy based on that (new content to include, and other basic stuff - not just blindly copying their meta tags).

Great content is paramount. It will also make others (eventually some big sites) link to you, and it will help a great deal.

Re:Nevermind the META tags!

[l00k]

Granted, for a number of years meta keywords have been only vaguely relevant for gaining a good search engine ranking. They're only one thing amongst many that are necessary to do in order to gain the best ranking possible, and definately down the list in terms of the most effective. Anyone reading through the linked article, or already familiar with search engine optimisation methods, will have come to the conclusion that ultimately (besides the notorious google-bomb method) the best way to have your site rank highly is to make an important and worthy site! So sophisticated are the algorithms used to judge search rankings.

That's not to say keywords aren't important, it's just where they're placed that will make the difference. Try placing keywords in the 'alt' text of images, in links between pages, in-the-URLs.html of your site. Even then, I've told some customers that their expectation of getting their site shelved in 1st place in Google are completely unrealistic unless they are indeed something of an authority on the subject searched for. And this is the way it should be! Being someone who uses Google everyday to find content, I'm glad optimisation has its limits.

Efficient way to optimize for engines?

[Jugalator]

Just have your site be focused for the readers, so a good algorithm will then not punish your site for artifical rank pumping. Doh!

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MOD PARENT DOWN

[petermgreen]

i had no problem finding his stite with it just now using google
http://www.google.com/search?q=gullible&sourceid=m ozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&cl ient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

Well, that's easy...

[Dragoonmac]

Malware authors have been doing Search engine optimiztion for years, this guide isn't useful...
If you want to get lots of Search engine hits...

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MOD PARENT UP

[makomk]

+1, Didn't Get The Joke

has anyone bothered to keep up with the times?

[caffeinemessiah]

So many comments talk about content, but content similarity was abandoned as the chief measure in searching years ago, when people started filling their pages with invisible, offtopic keywords to show up higher. Most contemporary ranking schemes are based on hyperlink analysis, i.e. the number and type of pages that LINK to your page, and vice versa.

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

For those with a taste for Yahoo, search for Kleinberg's original 1998 paper on HITS. I seriously doubt that these authors have anything more to contribute than the two papers I listed, unless of course they worked for Google/Yahoo and are violating some SERIOUS NDAs.

rule #1a

[KNicolson]

rule #1a is if you cannot get your article submitted once (or even twice...) include lots of gratuitous links to your website in any posts you might make here.

rule #2 is deliberately seeding MSN and Yahoo! (Google is immune) with keyword-laden articles - I once managed to accidentally (yeah right!) end up as the top site for "Japanese teen sex" on both these engines, but that's another story.

Thanks, Slashdot

[randfish]

I appreciate the link gang. It's quite an honor. Sorry about the site's slowness. We've fixed that and everyone should be able to browse it, no problem now. For those who are wondering, the guide contains a lot of information about how link popularity and the many, many metrics associated with it function. SEs like Google, Yahoo! and MSN have moved beyond pure content analysis and beyond simple link algorithms like HITS and PageRank - for an understanding of these more in-depth topics, I'd recommend looking elsewhere, though. This guide is really for newcomers to the subject.

Ordered List

[__aaitqo8496]

Anyone else find it ironic that they used an unordered list and then stuck letters on each list element instead of using a ordered list?

Okay, I'm just an HTML dork.

Knowledge of PageRank isn't enough

[GuyMannDude]

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

The best way to make money with SEO...

[aquarian]

...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...