When it comes to operating a business, in the digital age, nothing is more at the forefront of everyone's mind more than Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Back in the days before the internet business owners needed to rely on traditional advertising and yellow page ads, in order to attract non referral based business. The internet, with all of its' trials and tribulations, has become an equalizer, of sorts, where the savvy small business owner could actually expose themselves with little more investment than hosting fee's and a decent working knowledge of their business and what their clients are looking for. While there are SEO firms dedicated to developing both Black Hat trickery and White Hat content, effective Search Engine optimization is fairly simple, if you consider a few basic rules and principals
Black Hat SEO Graveyard
Search Engine Companies dedicate their existence to ferreting out malicious and in-genuine content. While Black Hat techniques, or simple trickery may be tempting, for fast and dirty results, this practice may result in your website being blacklisted by Search Engine providers. Some of these techniques include hidden keywords, misplaced keywords, spam back links and even randomly placed keywords and Meta-tags which do not relate to the actual content.
Skirting the Search Engine Algorithms
While the White hat approach can be more labour intensive, one must also be careful when walking the line of legitimacy. In some cases a SEO practice may be considered acceptable by the Search Engine Providers, they often change their algorithms. There are so called SEO Experts who make a living skirting the rules of acceptability and trying to understand the ever changing algorithms, in hopes of tricking the search engines into “believing” the website has great value to the searcher. These tactics often leave the information seeker disappointed and even disillusioned in the business who misled them. Remember that saying about never having a second chance to make a good impression? Well, your website is often the first impression many potential clients have of your business. Any short term successes in this arena will be washed away WHEN you are caught, in addition, you may offend your audience.
White Hat Relevant Content
back in 2007 I started playing around with Search Engine Optimization in a practice I jokingly referred to as “Blog Wh***ng” (You can fill in the blanks) I spend hours every day searching the internet for information on what people were searching for that day. Google has a great tool for this called Google Trends This tool is very handy in finding out the hot topics of the day and I used it to create keyword rich ad monetized content based around what the world wanted to know. Unfortunately the World often wanted to know some pretty dark stuff. I ended up giving up on this practice, as it provided me with an insight into Humanity, which I was not too pleased about. Lets just say Rubber Necking is not restricted to car accidents. I believe Don Henley said it best in Dirty Laundry.
Moving forward, no experience is truly a bad experience, so long as something is learned. During that process I witnessed how Human language structured content was rewarded by search engine presence. My Google Blogger content often found itself at the top of all major search engine, over and above many of the major news sources. Why? Because the content was written in such a way as to be keyword rich, but not offensively so. By offensively keyword rich I mean content which is so poorly written with repeated misplaced random keywords as to confuse the reader. When writing web content you need to remember while search engines are important, you also need to appeal to your potential client. Poorly written content is the best way to lose the attention of the reader. This is why I continually re-read and update my content.
Search Engines are Starving for Fresh and Legitimate Content
In addition to helping to improve readability, updating your content is a valuable practice which will demonstrate legitimacy to the Search Engines. This comes back to the difference between Evidence and Proof (Something I will get into in another article) Search Engines require evidence of your content being fresh and viable. Their algorithms determine the accuracy and define “Proof” The long and short of it is, with the billions of pages of daily internet content updates, it is important to keep your content at the forefront of the Search Engines as search engines place a lower priority on stale content, regardless of how keyword rich it may appear. Remember, your competitor may very well be updating their content and you need to provide content value evidence to the search engines. After all, Search Engine providers are also businesses and they want to ensure end users continue to use them to find legitimate and fresh content. At the end of the say, of you help the search engines, they will “help” you.