Back to the Basics – An SEO Refresher

First let’s just define a few terms. We SEO types love acronyms, so we may as well start with SEO!

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the process by which you make your website, blog or articles more palatable to the search engine. This is important because when people search for information on line, the search engine is like a traffic cop telling people the best way to go. The main search engine that people optimize for is Google.

Google is the biggest search engine. They have an index of useful pages on the web. Google has a system called Googlebot, commonly referred to as a ‘spider’ that crawls the web looking at stuff and deciding if it is good. If they see that your website holds good information, they will index you and you will have a spot on the SERPs.

The SERPs are the search engine results pages. These are what pops up on your screen in response to what you type into the search box. They are sorted from the top down in order of importance. Most people will choose one of the top ten listings, so these sites get the most traffic. The top listing is supposed to have the most relevant answer to your search based on the keywords you entered.

Keywords are the words that are entered to define a search. If someone is looking for clothes for animals, they might use the words ‘pet clothing’, ‘dog coats’ or ‘cat bonnets’. You want to use these keywords in your content so the spiders will know you have the answer to these types of searches, and Google will direct traffic your way.

Your Content is the words and images you have on your site and elsewhere on the web. This can be the information on the pages on your website, text surrounding your photos or video clips and press releases or articles you have submitted for publication elsewhere on the web for linking purposes.

Linking is the process of connecting one web page to another. There are different types of links – internal, where you link one page on your site to another in the site; and external, where you link to your site from your content outside on the web, or from another site. Linking is normally done by coding a word, phrase or image with instructions that will direct the searcher to your site (or ‘drive traffic’) if the link is clicked on. Links can also bring link juice to your site from a site that has PageRank.

PageRank is a kind of like electricity for websites. It’s what makes a site light up. If a site has PageRank, it can pass it through a link like electricity passes through a wire – hence the term link juice. If you have a link from a site with PageRank, it can pass a little on to you, and you can build your own PageRank. Be careful – if you buy a link that gives you PageRank Google can penalize you for trying to make your site seem bigger or better than it really is.

Penalties accrue when you don’t follow Google’s rules. You need to get links freely, from other people who think you have good information and feel that their own visitors will benefit from checking out your sites. Links like this are called ‘organic’ links. Paid links can still be used to drive traffic, as long as you ‘no-follow’ them.

No-following a link is just adding a bit of code. This tells Googlebot to ignore the link. If you pay another site to link to you it is kind of like paying for an ad to drive traffic to you. Google doesn’t mind that, but it doesn’t want you getting PageRank credit if the site you bought the link from can pass juice to you. No-following proves you are following the golden rule of SEO.

The golden rule of SEO is ‘Don’t be evil’. This wonderful quote is attributed to Matt Cutts, who has worked at Google since the beginning of time (or at least since the year 2000). He is part of the Search Quality team, and his job is to make sure the results Google serves up to web users are the best they can be – and that means no false inflation of your site’s worth, no link buying to increase your juice so you shine brighter than you should, and definitely no spam.

Spam is a canned, precooked meat product made by Hormel Foods… well, OK, there is a different meaning for spam, but it will have to wait for tomorrow as it deserves a post all its own.

Welcome to the great wide world of SEO. Now at least you can spout off some terminology at your next dinner party and sound like you know what you’re talking about.

Tomorrow: Spam, spam, spam, spam…