SEO the good and bad
Colleagues and friends I would like to write about SEO as I noticed most of webmasters & designers understood SEO as the art of deceiving search engines to gain better rankings, this is only the bad side of SEO and I want to go through the good and bad.
Bad SEO
You could deceive search engines and get indexed in a place you originally shouldn't be in, by buying fake back links or using headers just for the search crawlers to see and visually hiding it from visitors, that's just 2 tricks there is dozens out there.
Every day search engines upgrade there algorithms to become smarter than bad SEOs, on the other side SEOs create new tricks, if search engine discovered bad trick in a website it may lower its rank or even totally remove it from its database.
I hear some people saying "but showing in the first page of a specific keyword search results is vital to our business", there is always a proper solution. Ofcourse you know these: Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing & Microsoft Ad Center if you don't like pay-per-click plans try TLA to pay-per-month, I'm confused why people pay all that money on SEO while they could pay it on Ads.
Any way I don't know much about bad SEO as I never care to learn it, people always ask me, "Do you know about SEO?" if I answered yes, just the next question "how many back links could you get us ... you know the rest" so whoever ask me I answer "no", but I always wanted to explain to people what SEO really is.
Good SEO
SEO is not a thing to think about, you just have to start writing your clean markup using HTML tags only as they meant to be used, just think of the visitors, what title of the page they should see, what is the biggest first header <H1> better for your visitors to understand the content of this page, as you explain to your visitor the content of your page by its title and headers even regular paragraphs, also the crawlers will understand clearly where your page should be indexed on the search results, if you don't like this place you have to pay and buy an Ad plan.
So to simplify it Good SEO in two points :
- Use HTML tags as they meant to be used, your non-tabular data is not meant to be in a
<table>, don't use<div>unless you see it's really a division of the page like side bar, ads bar etc... , it's even better if you can free the main header of any wrappers. - Only markup your page nicely explaining to your visitors using page title, main
<H1>and maybe a brief explanation about your site wrapped in an<H2>about the content of your site in a brief informative words.
It's always a good idea to start marking up your document from scratch
<html>
<head>
<title>Page title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Page main header</h1>
<h2>The short description I mentioned earlier</h2>
<div id="main">
<h3>smaller header</h3>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<h3>Another header</h3>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<h4>Even smaller header</h4>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
<div id="side">
<h3>smaller header</h3>
<p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
That's for example, and you could mess with the CSS as you wish to style your page but leave markup clean and meaningful, to know what each tag mean you might consider checking HTML Dog.
At the end I like to point you to this Wikipedia entry that has more technical details about the topic.
September 30, 2007, 2:59 AM | SEO , Web standards , business
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