SEO… SE-shmo … what is all the hype about, I have a website that’s enough for me. WRONG! Unless you only want people that can remember your website address you need to do at least some basic SEO. Some of the easy things that you can do include keywords, and meta-data. So, what is SEO anyway? Search Engine Optimization is the process of making changes to your website to make them show up better on search engines. There are two main camps of SEO “black hat” and “white hat” and everything in between. Black-hatters use deceptive means to try to rank higher like having a webpage specifically written for spiders that is completely different than any user will see. White-hatters on the other hand use common practices and common sense in tandem to improve your site’s content and keywords so that the users can find the information that they are looking for. In general the Big three (Google, Yahoo, Bing/MSN) frown on making changes just to improve your ranking on the search engine without improving the user’s ability to find what they are looking for. This point is actually one of the main reasons that Google is changing their algorithm. In short, if it doesn’t allow a potential customer/user to find the information that they request then don’t do it!
At Next Step Computers we run a custom program over your site to determine a score based on best practices. For example, does your site have keywords listed in the meta-tags that are actually on the page itself? Just because you shove a bunch of words in the meta-tags, doesn’t make them KEYwords in the eye of search engines. There are also many free tools available that will tell you bits and pieces of the information that you need to accomplish a good SEO. One of the best tools comes from Google, Google Webmaster Tools. There are many others, but through Google you can access a community that will help you with questions, the tools will give you information on true keyword usage on your site, etc.
Spread the word:
No comments:
Post a Comment