Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization

isharq writes to tell us that SEOmoz has an interesting writeup regarding search engine optimization. The article has quite a bit of info and is geared so that even the inexperienced used can learn the basics of search engine optimization. From the article: "It is our goal to improve your ability to drive search traffic to your site and debunk major myths about SEO. We share this knowledge to help businesses, government, educational and non-profit organizations benefit from being listed in the major search engines."

fundamental

Step 1: Write better content.

seriously.

Absolutely

Step 1: Write better content.

That's in there. I think it's page four [seomoz.org] of TFA. They hit all the key points:

Accessiblity
Valid HTML/CSS
Good, Well written content

This article seems to know what it's talking about, and doubles as a decent guide to good web design principle. Awesome.

Nevermind the META tags!

Meta tags is still part of the very basic stuff that everyone already knows (hardly worth mentionning). In fact, too much people worry only about that. Worrying about meta tags before ensuring their content is good enough or that it can be indexed easily (especially if they use frames)! And when that proves to be insufficient, they hire some SEO-"guru", often the shady/not-so-ethical kind that makes pages with nothing but keywords (doorway pages) and such. Meta tags are so over-abused that search engines almost disregard them, they're just not THAT important anymore.

Often overlooked are small things like page titles, having your keywords in the article/page itself and perhaps in the URL (rewriting can come in handy), regular content updates, clean/semantic/valid/accessible markup - and use CSS (content to markup ratio helps), good links (in/out), etc.

SEO is easy for the most part. I've brought up the ranking of several sites rather easily - mostly by looking at the top results for the keywords we'd like to be found under and our main competitors... Find out what they do better/why they come ahead of you, and make up a strategy based on that (new content to include, and other basic stuff - not just blindly copying their meta tags).

Great content is paramount. It will also make others (eventually some big sites) link to you, and it will help a great deal.

Re:fundamental

Did you know that the world 'gullible' isn't indexed by Google?

MOD PARENT DOWN

i had no problem finding his stite with it just now using google
http://www.google.com/search?q=gullible&sourceid=m ozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&cl ient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official [google.com]

MOD PARENT UP

+1, Didn't Get The Joke

Re:fundamental

Absolutely correct.

You don't have to optimize if you're relevant, and if you're not relevant then you're fighting a losing battle. Google employs thousands of people and spends assloads of money to make sure the search engine continues to give good results. Google wants to be the top choice for search, and to do that they need to make sure that when somebody searches for "widget," they get sites most relevant to "widget."

If you've got the spiffiest widget site on the net, then you don't have to optimize for Google because Google is optimizing for you. And they're better at it than you are. It's their business to make sure people get to your site when they're looking for info on widgets.

If your widget site sucks and you manage to optimize your page to get a higher search ranking, then people are going to be annoyed when they search for widgets and your crappy site comes up. Google will see this as a bug in the search engine, and eventually it'll be fixed. Now you're working against Google's dev team. Good luck with that.

Land of blind

In the land of blind, the one eyed man is king.

However if everybody has night vision goggle, wouldn't everything back to the usual again?

This post is optimized

viagra computers internet world wide web xbox 360 playstation 3 ebay e-bay

77Punker.com
Your #1 search source!

I tried searching for info on this...

...but I couldn't find anything.

Recipients of the "help"

We share this knowledge to help businesses, government, educational and non-profit organizations benefit from being listed in the major search engines

Yes, I'm sure their motives are just that pure. I bet they would be shocked - shocked! - to learn that some less-than-scrupulous people were using their techniques to cause money to change hands. *rolls eyes*

Please, somebody who has RTFA tell me

Does the guide contain anything else but "try to make your site's content the best there is of its kind"?

similar article by seomoz

These guys wrote a search ranking factors article [seomoz.org] a month or two ago that is also a worthy read.

Easy

Content, Content, Content... And a little help for the search engines such as ALT tags and relevant TITLE tags. When setting up pages, I often look at the page in Lynx to see what the crawler should see. After all, it is a little hard for the search engine to describe an image without any tag data. Unless, of course, you are amazon and you have a turk at your disposal. Amazon's Mechanical Turk [slashdot.org]

26 steps guide, recommended reading

Another good resource is this old but still very applicable guide, 26 steps to 15k a Day [searchengineworld.com].

SEO

If you're interested in Search Engine Optimization, the tool can be used like the Overture Keyword Selector Tool [overture.com]. Similar results are obtained with both, which is interesting all in itself. A guy built an interface [hooznet.com] similar to Overture to use with Google Suggest.

Other than that I can't think of a real use... I usually know what I want to search for on Google. It could help optimize queries I guess (see the "number" of results before hitting submit, but not the quality...)

Happy Holidays to all Slashdotters, by the way :)

So where's the guide?

Honestly, I don't need a website telling me to put out media articles to get traffic to my site. Duh. "Hey! If you want traffic people have to know your website address!". Thanks for the help. What the hell do you really want?

rule #1

rule #1 for search engine optimization:

write an article and submit it to slashdot. once on slashdot, it will rank higher on google.

rule #1a

rule #1a is if you cannot get your article submitted once (or even twice...) include lots [whatjapanthinks.com] of gratuitous links [whatjapanthinks.com] to your website [whatjapanthinks.com] in any posts you might make here [whatjapanthinks.com].

rule #2 is deliberately seeding MSN and Yahoo! (Google is immune) with keyword-laden articles - I once managed to accidentally (yeah right!) end up as the top site for "Japanese teen sex" on both these engines, but that's another story.

SEO is BSEO

SEO is bullshit.
I rank #1, or in top 5 on Google for lots of things, and all I did was write about stuff that interested me.

Re:SEO is BSEO

Anybody can rank #1 in Google for "purple flying widgets", but it doesn't matter because no one searches for that [overture.com]. Getting clients to rank well for things like "home stereo" or "linux webhost" is where the challenge is; hardly "bullshit".

I didn't RTFA, but from the comments it sounds like I've read hundreds like it and it's preaching the "content is king" dogma. And that's pretty true. All you have to do is build a good site that people want to visit and you're halfway there. Unfortunately people just try to build a site with the "coolest" flash and spend time and money on the latest SE spam techniques.

So I agree with rakerman in that building a site on a topic you enjoy with interesting content is half the battle. You keep up with it, update it, and people will naturally link to it (links being the other half).

SEO actually seems to be getting easier in a sense. The complicated cloaking and doorway pages are much less effective on the major keyphrases than they used to be. You'll still see plenty of scrapper sites rank high in the major SEs, but the trend is against them.

Need much more

This article was nothing more than abstractions. How about some real meat, like exactly how to get your site ranked up there? I've been curious for a long time how to get sites to rank up in Google, Yahoo, etc., and while I admit I haven't done my homework, this article didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. When I saw the summary here, I really thought I was going to dive into some good material.

Well..

The problem is that the SEO spammers reset the game for the rest of the people over time by flooding out the methods that people can used to get ranked with their crap, meaning everyone has to keep changing to stay ahead, and obviously the way to do this is fresh, good quality, unique content. That's not to say that SEO spammers won't eventually see this and begin stealing/outsourcing content production in order to screw this up too

Slashdot

They would be better off reading the "Beginners guide to surviving slashdotting !"

add headlights to your keyword searches

'How to Conduct Keyword Research' http://www.seomoz.org/articles/bg3.php [seomoz.org]
"1. Brainstorming - Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type in to search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms, etc). "

Hmm...thinking of something that people would mistype in a search engine...
got it - bobos ttis bresats!

Efficient way to optimize for engines?

Just have your site be focused for the readers, so a good algorithm will then not punish your site for artifical rank pumping. Doh!

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Well, that's easy...

Malware authors have been doing Search engine optimiztion for years, this guide isn't useful...
If you want to get lots of Search engine hits...

Free Auto, Free Doom 3, Free Online Poker, Texas Hold em, Free Online Dating, Free Mp3, Free Movies, Free Celebrities, Pr0n, Spyware, Free Scan, Free PS3, Free Xbox 360, Free Crack, Free Serial, Free Cereal, pr0n, Free debt reduction, Free Cash, Free Search Assistant, Free Slashdot, and pR0n

well done!

Well done on getting a mention in slashdot seomoz! Who would have thought an article on SEO would get this much traffic to your site, maybe you need to put a slashdot part in the article lol :) ken, lsblogs http://www.lsblogs.com/ [lsblogs.com]

has anyone bothered to keep up with the times?

So many comments talk about content, but content similarity was abandoned as the chief measure in searching years ago, when people started filling their pages with invisible, offtopic keywords to show up higher. Most contemporary ranking schemes are based on hyperlink analysis, i.e. the number and type of pages that LINK to your page, and vice versa.

If you want to figure out how to boost your ratings, why not get the advice from the horse's mouth?

Brin and Page's original paper about PageRank (Google) : the original Google paper [stanford.edu]

Another PageRank paper Inside PageRank [google.com]

For those with a taste for Yahoo, search for Kleinberg's original 1998 paper on HITS. I seriously doubt that these authors have anything more to contribute than the two papers I listed, unless of course they worked for Google/Yahoo and are violating some SERIOUS NDAs.

Thanks, Slashdot

I appreciate the link gang. It's quite an honor. Sorry about the site's slowness. We've fixed that and everyone should be able to browse it, no problem now. For those who are wondering, the guide contains a lot of information about how link popularity and the many, many metrics associated with it function. SEs like Google, Yahoo! and MSN have moved beyond pure content analysis and beyond simple link algorithms like HITS and PageRank - for an understanding of these more in-depth topics, I'd recommend looking elsewhere, though. This guide is really for newcomers to the subject.

Ordered List

Anyone else find it ironic that they used an unordered list and then stuck letters on each list element instead of using a ordered list?

Okay, I'm just an HTML dork.

The best way to make money with SEO...

...is to run websites and/or give lectures on how to make money with SEO. It's sorta like no-money-down real estate infomercials...

They don't know crap.

A search for search engine optimization [google.com] does not even list them on their first page. Why take advice from him, when you can find who is first in their own business with a quick google search?

Another trick

is to find a high ranking site, such as slashdot, and post links to the website you're trying to boost the pagerank of. Not that I would ever do that, of course. :-)

If you're a unix user and can't use google's toolbar to check pagerank, you can check the pagerank of a url here: http://www.only999.com/google_page_rank.php [only999.com]

To the SEO experts...

I'm curious what anyone out there who would consider themselves to be pretty expert at optimising for search engines thinks of this article. Are there some things that have been left out? Have some things been overplayed? It's alright if you don't want to actually disclose any secrets you know that were not mentioned, but if you could just signal how complete the article is.

SEO

Posting your hard earned methods of seo to slashdot is a sure fire way to have search engines change their algorithms to remove any vulnerabilitys to bad search results. Anyone who would do that would be a fool as they would stop themselves from earning from their scarce knowledge, and would be in effect working for the search engines for free. The only circumstances where this may be done is when new unknown methods become available and ones competitors can be eliminated by publishing the old methods that they use making them ineffective, whilst only you have new methods that make the value of your knowledge vastly higher.

I don't want to give anyhing away but google currently has 12 vulnerabilitys and msn 9 these are the only engines we currently research.

Still you also always need 'some' content but once you have something reasonable, certain seo methods can boost its rank way above the others.

Oh i may give a clue about something that maybe coming to the end of its useful life, cache!

theres two types of SEO

good above board SEO and bad SEO which may get your site banned from search engines if caught.

good SEO is about running a good site that a bot can navigate and index without knowlage of advanced technologies, not moving shit arround all the time and providing good enough content that people wan't to link to you. A while back i'd have included honest meta tags here too but they are pretty much worthless now afaict. Basically all the stuff you should be doing anyway to make a good quality accessible site.

bad SEO is about finding ways to manipulate the search engine to your own ends without generally improving the site. Spamming your link arround is one way so are some tricks that exploit the alorithm (sometimes involving lots of domains and shit like that). Taking highly ranked domains that have been inadvertantly left to expire regardless of if they have anything to do with your subject matter is another way.

quality

Another quality piece of work Rand. Way to go!

Re:**Beatles-Beatles

Beatles is at a job interview.....for /. He'll complain about not knowing about the article till he got out some time around......7:00 tonight probably

Re:Ah, nostalgia...

Umm.... you mean the days when you could rank high by repeating certain words 7,000 times in really small text (or even in the same color as the background) at the bottom of your page? I don't know if I'd call those the "good" old days. And besides, it was still optimizing then, the optimizing was just done differently.

    Now, instead of trying to create the illusion of having relevant content, you have to create the illusion of both relevant content *and* popularity.

steve

Re:**Beatles-Beatles

Gone. Now I'll have to buy som ipecac for those emergencies.

Re:**Beatles-Beatles

**Beatles-Beatles [goatse.cx] needs to...

No way I click on this link ! It happened once (ewww), I won't let it happen again...

Re:Before You Start

That's why you posted AC?

Re:Before You Start

1: before you start google for your new name if you get any results pick another one.

2: get at least com org and net domains and if your site has a local bias get domains in whatever locally relavent tlds you deem nessacery. Don't bother with info biz etc people are unlikly to go to those by mistake.

Re:**Beatles-Beatles

Don't worry, I'm sure **Beatles-Beatles will catch the dupe ;o)

Re:**Beatles-Beatles

he's in mourning today.