ELWsoftware.com

Search engine optimization is a noble goal, but how should you spend your valuable time to get the most effect?

1. Measurement! Measuring your progress is the first and most important thing to do.  Try the Rank Checker from Seobook for starters.  This tool (and many others) allows you to keep track of where your site appears for search terms that interest you.  It is important to use a tool like this for a number of reasons, the first of which is because it will save you time.  Second, search engines (especially Google) customize search results for you if you look at them manually.  This will give you a biased view of where your site will appear to the rest of the world.
2. Content! It doesn’t matter where your page appears in search results if you have nothing good to see.  This should be obvious, but some people never learn.  You probably need a thousand times more work to get a bad site to rank higher.
3. More Content!! All the content in the world will have a hard time competing with regularly-updated, new stuff.  You need to write quite a few articles to get people to notice you, and it will take time.  An easier way to get content is to generate it automatically.  I don’t mean fake articles written by a computer, or scraping somebody else’s site.  The quickest way to generate content is to get other people to volunteer to write for you.  Think of a way to get other people to generate content for you, and you are set.  (Think about Youtube, Wikipedia, and if you can think big enough… Google itself)
4. Links! I mean inbound links, not links to other people from your site.  There are no good shortcuts, this actually takes work.  Google hates anything related to bought links, so don’t buy links.  The first thing to think about is finding existing sites to link to yours.  This can certainly be difficult, since anybody worth asking probably won’t waste their time with you.  If you ask anybody for a link, try to personalize the request.  Don’t think for a second that you are the first person to think of sending the same email to every webmaster on the internet.
5. Link Bait! This is my favorite technique for obtaining links.  Make pages that solve a problem everybody has!  Any time you find yourself using Google or Yahoo to find the answer to a question, take a good look at what comes up in the results.  Example:  When your mouse stops working, there will be a page telling you how to fix it.  Is there a reason you can’t generate a SEO focused version of what you found?  NO.  This is especially effective if the answer is hard to find.  Even more effective is when the problem happens regularly over and over.  Think how many people have Apple’s Mighty Mouse, and I guarantee every one of them will eventually have problems with their scroll ball.  (If you are wondering, take the mouse upside-down and rub the scroll ball around on a damp paper towel)

In summary, if you want your page to get more traffic you need to provide something worth seeing.  Any other techniques are about as effective as the effort you put forth.  SEO is supposed to be hard!  Next time you get upset about where your page ranks, look how many pages are BELOW YOU.  They will probably stay there.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the term used to describe changes to your web site that make it easier to find on search engines.  When I read about SEO services offered by others I get a bit discouraged.  Here are a few myths about SEO I see regularly:

1. Submitting your site to search engines = SEO. Yes, this is important.  If you don’t submit your site to the major search engines it is possible that nobody will ever see it.  Too bad it only takes a few minutes to do!  I could do it for your web site in less time than it took to write this paragraph.  So, anyone who charges for this or considers it SEO is full of it.
2. Guarantee 1st page of Google! Wouldn’t it be nice if some professional with all the knowledge in the world could guarantee that your page would show up first in the search results in Google?  Well, they can!  The only trouble is that they don’t say what the search was for.  I guarantee that there is already some search phrase that will produce your page as the 1st result! Guarantees are as dangerous in SEO as they are in any other business.  Would you trust somebody who guaranteed to double your money?
3. SEO can be done quickly. Yes, you can change a few things on your site quickly, but good SEO practices take time to see results improve.  SEO is like public relations or advertising since it costs time and usually money to get real improvements quickly.

So, to summarize the above points, if you aren’t careful you can spend money and get nothing.  What should you be looking for in SEO?

1. Keyword analysis. For at least the near future, search engines will be using keywords as the primary tool for their search technology.  There are better techniques that find better results, but they are still far too slow to be used by major search engines.  So, your keywords should be the important focus of SEO.  We suggest starting with the most basic description of what you offer, then add your location.  Example: We would use web design riverside, or SEO inland empire.  Professionals should also be able to provide you with statistics showing how many people search for these terms.
2. Paid search placement. Yes, if you are willing to pay for it, you can immediately get your site placed on the first page of results for ANY keywords you want.  Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have options for paid search.  While you are waiting for regular SEO to take effect, consider using Adwords to increase traffic immediately.  Some snobs out there say paid placement doesn’t count as SEO.  Find out what they charge, then ask us how much traffic we could get you with that money.
3. The Long Tail. The best way to beat the big search engine machine is to use long tail keywords.  These are the more specific phrases that big companies can’t waste time with.  Competition is the key to successful SEO.  It is way too expensive to compete for keywords like music, so why not focus your energy on inland empire reggae music.  Being more specific gives you less traffic, but people searching for specific phrases are more motivated!

Keyword density refers to how often a word is found on a page as a percentage of the total.  There are plenty of articles and arguments about how placing a single keyword many times in your page could be a bad thing.  This morning I discovered that this might actually be effective.

Certainly we are aware that ELW can mean many different things to different people.  Now we find that it is used to abbreviate the E.L. Wright award at the Darlington School.  It turns out that this award looks like one of Michael Scott’s Dundie awards that everybody gets.  So, as it turns out the word ELW is listed after just about everybody’s name.  I have no disrespect for these future leaders of the world.  Good luck kids!

What ELW readers should be aware of is that as a web design company paying very close attention to SEO, everyone at ELW knows when somebody new on the internet uses the letters ELW.  As luck would have it, there is also a student at the Darlington School with the last name SEO.  Seriously, sometimes you just get unlucky with keywords!

It is obvious that the above mentioned page with zero inbound links should suddenly appear at the top of the search results for the phrase ELW SEO.  The relevance for this page to someone looking for SEO should not even come on the radar.  I’m sure the student with the name SEO is aware of what shows up when you search for SEO using any search engine.  The Phrase ELW is what is important, and its keyword density is right around 5%.  This just happens to be the suggested keyword density many professionals suggest to optimize a page for a keyword.

Has everybody heard about search engine optimization, or SEO?  If you haven’t, let me explain the basics here for you.  Search engines organize pages according to what content they have.  Then when you type something into a search box, they dig out pages that have that content.  That is the simple overview of how things work, and search engine optimization tries to manipulate this process to increase the chances of your page showing up.

So, what is wrong with doing everything you can to get your page to show up more often, or in a more visible place?  Absolutely nothing, until everybody starts doing the same things.  Think how cool the first drive-up window was at a fast food restaurant, and how nobody even cares anymore.  Drive-ups used to improve sales, now they are practically a requirement in order to compete.  It is the same thing with SEO, but it is much more serious.  If you don’t do SEO, it is possible that nobody will ever even see your website.  Burger king, no matter how many television ads they buy, can’t make your restaurant invisible.  If someone does enough search engine tricks, they can make finding your page impossible for all but the most persistent searchers.

So, what should someone do who wants to improve their business using the internet?  It is a difficult question to answer.  One group will tell you to do all of the nice and honest things Google says will help you.  This is typical “white hat” SEO, and includes generating relevant content that will make people visit your page.  This makes other sites link to your page, and your visibility on search engines is improved.  The problem is that now there is an incentive for people to make a bunch of links to themselves from pages they control, or on message boards.  I call this phenomenon “link shitting” because it is just crap all over the place.  Somewhere along the way this process became automated.  This would fall into the category of “black hat” SEO by most professionals.  Is black hat bad?  White hat professionals usually say yes, but they want to get your money.  There is also a lot of talk about Google penalizing you if they find out that you are using black hat techniques.  If this were the case then the obvious response would be to use black-hat techniques against your competitors!  I lean toward believing that using black hat techniques won’t hurt you, but could stop your site from improving.

The real question people should be asking is why the search engines don’t improve their systems so that black-hat SEO has no effect?  For the most part they getting better at it, but they still suck.  For a few hundred dollars you can go on Elance.com and find some foreigner to do all sorts of black-hat SEO for you.  You will probably get dozens of offers competing with each other to do whatever you request.

Search engine optimization is old and dead.  I expect that trying to rig search engine results is useless for anybody except when your site is really bad.  There are still plenty of sites that don’t have a single text keyword anywhere, and will never be found by anybody searching.  Everybody with a decent site should be focusing on improving their business in different ways.  We have plenty of good ideas at ELW, if you are interested.

With a little creativity and hard work, SEO is not necessary to get your page found on the internet.  At ELW we won’t waste any of your time or money stuffing keywords all over your page, or putting links to your site in the comments of videos on Youtube, or using any other juvenile techniques.  Contact us for a free consultation.

SEO, the often used shorthand for search engine optimization, could be on its last legs.  We at ELW prefer to use the phrase search engine improvement.  Optimization suggests that there is a highest point that can be achieved through your efforts.  This is not the case, since there are always improvement that can be made.  Even if you are the top of the major search engines for a few keywords, there are always more keywords to work at.  You also need to work on conversions.  It doesn’t matter how high up in search engine results you are if nobody clicks your listing.  You also need people to buy something or do something when they come to your page.  This is why we stick with the term search engine improvement.