Having your website up and running is really only a beginning. The next and probably most important step is to start driving traffic to your website. For your website to be truly effective, you will most likely want hundreds if not thousands of unique visitors every day. And as Search Engines play a vital role in this, its important to have a good grasp of what they are and how you can work with them.
THE PURPOSE OF A SEARCH ENGINE
When you go to a website like Google and type a word or phrase into the search engine, you probably are hoping to find results which are:
Relevant
Good Quality
Useful
Varied
Imagine if you went to a search engine and typed in “dog collars,” but then got results such as the following:
Websites about coffee cups
Pages written in unclear English with bad grammar, difficult to read, and uninformative.
The same website appearing over and over in the top 10 positions, instead of a variety of different websites with information on dog collars
Or, even worse yet, pages of incoherent gibberish which simply have the word “dog collars” repeated over and over in their text.
You would probably feel that search engine was not very useful, and you wouldn’t use that search engine again. You would look for a better one.
Those who program search engines and who write their algorithms are aware of this fact. They want their seach engines to provide results which are as useful, relevant, and high-quality as possible. This will make people want to use those search engines more.
On the other side of the coin, there are people who work against the search engines.
How and why would they do that?
Well, usually these are people who own websites. They want their websites to rank well in the search engines, but they don’t want to work too hard to get them there. So they try to short-cut the system and cheat their way to the top.
Its okay to practice SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in order to try to get to the top. But that includes building high-quality and useful websites which will provide useful and relevant information to the people who are searching for information online. When webmasters try to trick the search engines into giving them a higher ranking or more traffic than they deserve, this is called “black hat SEO.”
In an effort to combat black-hat SEO and to maintain the integrity of their search results, search engines (or, the people who program them, that is) are continually modifying and improving their algorithms. Every time someone comes up with a new trick they can use to get around the algorithms, the search engine companies come out with a new algorithm in response – and so it goes.
Search engines algorithms are kept a secret, in order to make it harder for people to try to shortcut them. Therefore, Search Engine Pptimization is an interesting field. It is an area of constant change, some mystery, and lots of room for opinion.
At the same time, there are many key basic facts that you can learn and apply, successfully and ethically, in order to get more relevant traffic to a website or websites. And most importantly, keep in mind what the purpose of a search engine is – so that you can work with it, and not against it. Good website content and good SEO go hand-in-hand. Together they are a highly powerful combination. One without the other is not.
THE PURPOSE OF A SEARCH ENGINE
When you go to a website like Google and type a word or phrase into the search engine, you probably are hoping to find results which are:
Relevant
Good Quality
Useful
Varied
Imagine if you went to a search engine and typed in “dog collars,” but then got results such as the following:
Websites about coffee cups
Pages written in unclear English with bad grammar, difficult to read, and uninformative.
The same website appearing over and over in the top 10 positions, instead of a variety of different websites with information on dog collars
Or, even worse yet, pages of incoherent gibberish which simply have the word “dog collars” repeated over and over in their text.
You would probably feel that search engine was not very useful, and you wouldn’t use that search engine again. You would look for a better one.
Those who program search engines and who write their algorithms are aware of this fact. They want their seach engines to provide results which are as useful, relevant, and high-quality as possible. This will make people want to use those search engines more.
On the other side of the coin, there are people who work against the search engines.
How and why would they do that?
Well, usually these are people who own websites. They want their websites to rank well in the search engines, but they don’t want to work too hard to get them there. So they try to short-cut the system and cheat their way to the top.
Its okay to practice SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in order to try to get to the top. But that includes building high-quality and useful websites which will provide useful and relevant information to the people who are searching for information online. When webmasters try to trick the search engines into giving them a higher ranking or more traffic than they deserve, this is called “black hat SEO.”
In an effort to combat black-hat SEO and to maintain the integrity of their search results, search engines (or, the people who program them, that is) are continually modifying and improving their algorithms. Every time someone comes up with a new trick they can use to get around the algorithms, the search engine companies come out with a new algorithm in response – and so it goes.
Search engines algorithms are kept a secret, in order to make it harder for people to try to shortcut them. Therefore, Search Engine Pptimization is an interesting field. It is an area of constant change, some mystery, and lots of room for opinion.
At the same time, there are many key basic facts that you can learn and apply, successfully and ethically, in order to get more relevant traffic to a website or websites. And most importantly, keep in mind what the purpose of a search engine is – so that you can work with it, and not against it. Good website content and good SEO go hand-in-hand. Together they are a highly powerful combination. One without the other is not.
No comments:
Post a Comment