SEO: Did you know?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is probably the most efficient form of internet marketing for all those who have mastered it.

As fast as we can write in-depth SEO articles, the leading search engines can tweak their policies. So this page contains merely an outline of the concepts involved in SEO. Very simple, but you won't easily find this sort of thing anywhere else; because "experts" are too busy rattling their brains over trivial details. You might, however, find a similar chart on the top-secret tables of senior Google or Yahoo engineers; and they may be wondering where we got ours from. Let's say it's all based on logic.

SEO
- Onsite SEO
  - Content (words)
    - Relevance (common ground of theme)
    - Quantity
    - Accuracy (validity)
      - Spelling
      - Grammar
    - Depth & breadth of context (semantic quality)
    - Uniqueness (originality)
    - Age
      — If your page's content has stayed the same for years, search engines trust it to stay the same for a few days longer, so your page will rank higher. But if the content on your page is always changing, then search engines will crawl it regularly to keep their index up-to-date. Regularly changing content is good for getting new content picked up quickly. To get the best of both worlds, most large websites leave the main content of article pages untouched (or concatenate further content rather than overwriting old content) while regularly changing the home and portal pages to link to the latest content. The BBC News website, for example, claims to update its homepage every minute of every day; although this could possibly be just the clock updating, which we can do by the microsecond... 04:35:55.705211 GMT.
  - Code (accessibility of HTML)
    - Semantic quality
      - Individual elements
      - Overall structure
    - Validity of syntax (accuracy / compliance with standards)
    - Efficiency (content:code ratio / quantity)
      — This is an area neglected by a lot of people who call themselves "seo experts". It carries minor influence compared to heavy link-building (offsite SEO), but is still worth some attention. As the web gets more & more competitive, and dominated by monopolistic giants, the search engines are paying more & more attention to pages with clean & efficient, and optimally accessible code. Just look at the google.com source code for an example of minimalistic code (no unnecessary white space, quoted attribute values, long javascript variable names...etc). This might make the difference of between a fast, slow or non-existant page load for only a very small percentage of Google's users, but 0.1% of a million is still a considerable number; so if you want a very popular website then content:code ratio is worth thinking about.
- Onsite, offpage SEO (intrasite, interpage SEO)
  - Age of domain registration
    — As time goes on, major search engines spammers stand more and more chance of being caught and blacklisted. Age is an irreplacable measure of trustability. An ancient site that's been around for years, typically finds it a lot easier to rank highly for very competitive search terms than a fairly new site would. But if a new site gets links from old and trusted site, this partially compensates for lack of age of the new site.
  - Architecture
  - Relevance
- Offpage AND/OR offsite SEO (links)
  — Based around premium link-building services, you don't have to re-code or re-word your website in order to successfully raise your search engine rankings and increase your hits and sales.
  - Age
    — It's easy to spam or otherwise trick someone to link from their site to yours, but it's not so easy to generate inlinks which last for years.
  - Relevance (content theme)
  - Weight (quantity / authority / PageRank)
    — This is the one that everyone wants to know about. When you can throw this stuff around, you don't need to re-code or re-word a website in order to successfully raise its search engine rankings and increase its hits and sales. The online market for trading PageRank is as underground as the trading of weed on the streets.

Be careful

Search engine companies don't like to think that their rankings can be heavily influenced by marketeers, so SEO is always a "dark art", as is any form of persuasive marketing. Beware of SEO agencies that clearly breach search engine guidelines, because your site's rankings could be permanently penalised for participating in such schemes. See:

SEO: Did you know?

Be careful

See also: