Posted on: 05 May, 2009
People that use computers love their acronyms. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and is the practice of attempting to secure a higher ranked position in the Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs as our acronym wielding friends like to call them.
There are commonly two kinds of people that practice SEO. The white hat SEO’s like to think of themselves as the good guys. They try their best to play by the rules and generally don’t want to upset anyone. The black hat SEO’s rather unsurprisingly take the opposite stance, and will actively pursue an advantage through dishonest means at the risk of being discovered and banned.
Although there are many people and companies that are legitimately thought of as SEO experts, there many others who claim to be experts without any cause to do so. Many of the things that will increase the rank of your pages in the major search engines can be done quickly and cheaply without the need to hire in a professional. Here are some of the things you can do without spending anything:
This really is the most important step in SEO. If your page contains useful information, or provides a useful service, people will visit the page, bookmark it, link to it, and recommend it to others. There is no substitute for this.
Search engines generally use programs known as spiders to search the internet for content and rate it’s relevance against the searches that their users might be performing. In order for this process to work best for your site it is important that these spiders can understand the content you are providing. The best way to ensure that this takes place is to use clean, standards compliant code in your web pages. The W3C has an on-line validator tool that can help with this. Although the search engine spider programs are intelligent and growing more advanced all the time, they still cannot understand the content of things like video, or information that may have been provided in a proprietary format such as Flash.
The three major search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Other search engines will usually build their indexes based on what is listed by these three. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have services that enable you to submit website addresses to their respective indexes, and then monitor the behaviour of your pages once they are listed. The Google service is called Google Webmaster tools. For Yahoo it’s theYahoo Site Explorer and the MSN equivalent is named the MSN Webmaster Center.
For more detailed information check this page on Wikipedia.
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