All about SEO

Since the dot com bubble last 2001-2002, not only businesses and companies managed to get their own dot com domains. Even the commoners and IT savvy people managed to get one of their own. Back at these times, website creation was still reserved for geeks, and special know hows in the internet world belonged to the privileged and learned people. Soonafter, various technologies have been born to produce more people visibility online. There were tools and services like Yahoo! Geocities, Homestead, etc. The reason that these personal sites came about better in marketing aspects is that they were children of the biggest network–Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. More and more users crowded these communities in hope that their pages would reach millions of online users and gain greater visibility/scope/popularity.

That era is now long dead. Some dot com owners since 2000’s and even way before, who managed to keep their sites, turned their sites into an enormous web log. Later on, it evolved into what we call as blogs nowadays. It used to be an online repository of daily accountabilities, stuffs to share, stories and/or poems written.. more of a very personal information. At these times, blogs now have flavors.. specializations. Some are famed for writing good fictional stories, others collect trails of jokes and fun stuffs. Others focus on delivering informational articles, or even tutorials. And what has been moving the blogging trend to a different level is the use of blogs for earning money.

Blogs are like websites. There can be promotions (self promotion, product promotions, self less promotions, etc.). Everything is about ranks, popularity and extent. Almost all of the bloggers who want to be recognized understand the necessity of working on these aspects. These stuffs are called SEO information and tips. There are tons of sites, tools and utilities that can help you with these. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is just an aspect of product pushing. Its not the beauty or the amount of content in the site that determines the rank of the page against the total millions of pages available in the web.

Since the web is a vast storage of communication and knowledge base, the best way to reach a page is by using search engines. This is where Google kicks in the picture. From the birth of search engines, especially Google, that uses a different searching algorithm than the others, more and more sites have gained hope that they can reach into the top few pages of search results using specific, predefined keywords. In order to push a site upward in rank (either by Google, or Yahoo), its content must be consistently swarming with specific target keywords that will help spiders, crawlers and bots to index your site under your desired keywords. Consistent updating of pages’ content will also help boost up your rank.

Here are some helpful SEO tips and stuffs that can help:

Define clear meta tags and keywords for all of your pages
Determining relevance of keywords with target niche of audience
Define robots.txt
Consistent use and mention of keywords in pages’ contents
Consistent updating of pages’ contents (keep a high activity within the site)
Link networking (use of blog directories, etc)
Harvest of inbound links
Marketing for other sites that can direct you more users (not necessarily a link networking site)
Information dissemination (either via newsletters, trackbacks, etc)
Optimizing HTML codes by using appropriate attributes (alt for images)
Use of correct markup tags for important logics (use of strong vs bold and/or em vs ital; H1 to H6)
Remove or minimize use of items that cannot be crawled by spiders (like flash contents)
Age of website / domain

These are some of the few stuffs I try to keep in my head. (I have a lot of tools and bookmarks too that may be related to this. Maybe I’ll post them up soon.)

In a nutshell, good SEO can bring almost any website up to the first few search results of a search engine given proper thought of its keywords and marketability. So, the next time you’ll think of buying a domain, better be sure to hold on to it and do your homework if you want to make it visible to the world. And what comes after SEO? Well, that would be server optimization.. worth another article, don’t you think?