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

[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.

This post is optimized

[77Punker]

viagra computers internet world wide web xbox 360 playstation 3 ebay e-bay

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.