Seach
Engine Optimizing by XSEO
We
hear about search engine optimizing pretty much every day. Judging by the number
of unsolicited e-mails promising extra traffic, it should be a major growth area.
One reason for all this activity is the widespread availability of so-called optimisation
programs.
They
analyse your page and make recommendations on what you can do to make it more
search-engine-friendly. The best among these are updated almost daily to stay
abreast of changes in Search Engine criteria. But we've seen some that haven't
changed for two years, and they're downright dangerous (see pitfalls for more
on this).
So do you tweak your pages every time there's a change in search
engine practice? If you like, but bear in mind that you won't see the results
of your optimisation for four to six weeks, so how do you tell if you were successful?
SEO does work, and it will bring more traffic to your site. But there's no substitute
for knowledge and the capacity for hard work.
There
are few tricks involved, other than being "on the case" and ready to innovate
and put in the commitment to delivering the result.
There
are essentially two types of search engine: those driven by automatic "spiders",
and those operated by human editors. In practice many of the listing companies
use a combination of the two techniques.
Spiders
have a limited amount of intelligence which allows them to judge the relevance
of a page for a particular search criterion. They're also able to recognise -
and delist - certain of the more obvious tricks. This helps the search engine
companies to avoid sending hits to sites that are trying to gain traffic that
isn't relevant to the search word. Human operators visit hundreds of sites daily,
making judgments in a few seconds of what the site's about.
Yahoo is
the best known of this type of directory; like most systems of this type, Yahoo
also receives input from spiders. Web site ptimisation is the process of making
a site easily understood by the spider or the editor. A carefully judged weighting
is given to certain keywords to achieve a listing under relevant searches.
When a page has been optimised, it's submitted to the search engines for
evaluation and - hopefully - a high level listing. This last part of the process
is a question of finely judged timing - Multiple submissions are necessary, but
overdo it and you'll be de-listed (see pifalls for more about this). The XSEO
approach to all this is offer the search engines what they're looking for: clearly
understandable pages that can be easily classified by humans or spiders. Inevitably,
there are a few tricks of the trade that we use, but they're designed to help
the search engine, not fool it.
find
out more about search engine optimisation...
