seo
posted in search engine optimization  on 19 January 2007
by Andrew Lang 
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Don't pay for SEO - just be natural

Plain-English guide / jargon refresher: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimis(z)ation; it's the practice of altering your website's content (to 'optimise' it) so as to give it higher rankings in the search engine results pages for particular keywords / keyphrases. This is coupled with a campaign to get as many trustworthy/relevant websites linking to your website.

One of our clients was approached by an SEO company, promising them high ranking positions in search engines for chosen keywords. You probably know about these types of companies already. Their charges were easily in excess of £2000 for set-up and first 12 months support - followed by around £1500 per year for updates and support.

You can save yourself this money and do your own SEO without even realising you're doing it.

Before we tell you how to do this (and we aren't going to be revealing anything amazing, only boring stuff that involves work) - it's important to realise one thing:

The major search engine companies such as Google don't like SEO.

In their ideal world, people create websites completely unconscious of search engine results. They want websites to have unique content that isn't overtly conscious of how search engine algorithms might or might not work. Google wants the most useful, trusted results to be at the top of their listings, because Google's very reason-to-be is to provide its customers with quality search results - not the most SEO'd websites which is no guarantee of quality.

There's a kind-of 'war of atricion' going on between the likes of Google and SEO types : the content of many websites is clearly written with search engines in mind, rather than appealing directly to people. The thing is - search engine's customers are people, so these types of websites aren't what Google wants to see at the top of its results.

And so search engines try to make it more difficult to 'game' the system. The more mechanical aspects of search engine optimization such as buying links (a bit like paying people to like you), deliberately repeating keywords in content, and emphasising particular keywords - are becoming a lot less effective.

Not only that, but the trend is moving swiftly towards 'social networking' sites like Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon - community sites where people go to find interesting articles / websites. This is a subtle shift from the sole reliance of using search engines to find stuff.

And still more - the wikisaria search engine will be launched sometime this year - a search engine edited by people; and no amount of SEO is going to convince a human editor your website is actually useful and interesting to its customers.

The trend is definitely moving towards 'cleaner' forms of SEO : the future success of your website is going to rely a lot more on the uniqueness and usefulness of the content you add to your website.

Your website will survive any change to Google's algorithm - to any new developments and trends in internet browsing - if you follow these two simple steps:-

  • create unique and interesting content that people want to link to in the first place - you get people linking while search engines get to index unique content - you're pleasing both people and search engines - which is really the same thing : people. With continuous, up-to-date unique content, your site will slowly over time be seen as an 'authority' website gaining more trust. What's that you ask? What do you mean by 'interesting' and 'useful' and 'unique'? This is something you should find out about your market.


  • natural link partnerships - in-bound links to your website built up slowly over time that aren't associated to linking networks that SEO companies often use.

These two points need to be supported by a website that covers the basics of on-page optimization, usability and accessibility. We only touch on these points because these shouldn't be your concerns as the website owner (it should be your website developer's).

We have our own 95/5 rule : spend 95% of the time you devote to your website adding new, unique, useful content to it. Give something for people to link to, and some unique content for search engines to index. Content can be new products, services, news, articles. You will also gain many more repeat visitors as they can see your site is continually being updated. Spend the other 5% soliciting for direct link partnerships (link swapping).

In a few year's time, it's likely that the 'darker', more mechanical aspects of SEO will be seen as an aberration that was dealt with via more sophisticated algorithms and human-edited search engines - giving users more relevant search results. The winners will be the most interesting and the most useful websites offering unique information/products/services.

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