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Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Dec 07, 2005 05:52 PM
from the how-to-until-search-engines-change-next-week dept.
The Internet Businesses
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."
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  • fundamental (Score:5, Funny)

    by TedCheshireAcad (311748) <ted@noSPAM.fc.rit.edu> on Wednesday December 07 2005, @05:53PM (#14205988) Homepage
    Step 1: Write better content.

    seriously.

    • Absolutely (Score:5, Informative)

      by conJunk (779958) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @05:59PM (#14206019)
      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.

      • <meta http-equiv="Keywords" name="Keywords" content="lol this is not a search engine optimization">

        • Nevermind the META tags! (Score:5, Informative)

          by Nik13 (837926) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:38PM (#14206220) Homepage
          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.
          • Granted, for a number of years meta keywords have been only vaguely relevant for gaining a good search engine ranking. They're only one thing amongst many that are necessary to do in order to gain the best ranking possible, and definately down the list in terms of the most effective. Anyone reading through the linked article, or already familiar with search engine optimisation methods, will have come to the conclusion that ultimately (besides the notorious google-bomb method) the best way to have your site
    • Step 1: Write better content.

      No kidding. My website, Gullible.Info [gullible.info], is the #1 google result for "gullible", and we didn't do any of this "search engine optimization" stuff. We just wrote amusing stuff, and people linked to us.
    • I think history has shown that "better content" has little to do with search engine ranking. You just have to know how to work the system better than your competitor.

      Having said that, I wish someone would invent a search engine that would push some of this "better content" to the top of search engine results.

    • Re:fundamental (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SpecBear (769433) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:46PM (#14206280)

      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.

      • I agree with you to some degree, but you're not entirely correct IMO.

        An example: I manage one particular corporate website where the content couldn't be any more relevant. Nothing spammy or light-weight about it really - no tricks. Prior to my "optimization", the site was a page or two back on google for several very important key-phrases. After optimization, the site rose to the first page. I was able to achieve this without cheating, but simply being a little smarter about how the page was coded...pay
    • Step 1: Write better content.

      Yup. Elements of Style [amazon.com]. Read it.

    • My website has a PR6 in google since I put some content on it. The start content was 6 links, and some under construction text, total size about 1kB. My conclusion based on that is:
      Avoid lots of images & complex pieces of html/javascript which only do little.
      Have a high content to HTML code ratio apparently is good for search engines. Google & MSN visit my site with now about 5kB of content several times a day, and I get lots of search hits. It is fun though if people really read your content and ho

  • This post is optimized (Score:5, Funny)

    by 77Punker (673758) <spencr04 AT highpoint DOT edu> on Wednesday December 07 2005, @05:58PM (#14206009)
    viagra computers internet world wide web xbox 360 playstation 3 ebay e-bay

    77Punker.com
    Your #1 search source!

  • 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*

    • What do you think they mean when they say "...help businesses... benefit from being listed in the major search engines"? I don't think they're implying anything other than the profit motive.

      Too bad it wrecks the Internet for the rest of us though. I've found product research increasingly difficult lately. Searches for products lead straight to link farms such as eopinions.com. (I know they would claim legitimacy but 99% of the time their page says "be the first to leave a review..."

  • similar article by seomoz (Score:5, Informative)

    by QuakerOatmeal (442564) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:04PM (#14206050)
    These guys wrote a search ranking factors article [seomoz.org] a month or two ago that is also a worthy read.

  • Easy (Score:5, Informative)

    by rbinns (849119) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:07PM (#14206064)
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by mcguyver (589810) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:10PM (#14206082)
    Another good resource is this old but still very applicable guide, 26 steps to 15k a Day [searchengineworld.com].

  • SEO (Score:3, Interesting)

    by boingyzain (739759) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:11PM (#14206086)
    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 :)

  • rule #1 (Score:5, Funny)

    by circletimessquare (444983) <(circletimessquare) (at) (gmail.com)> on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:24PM (#14206154) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Funny)

      by KNicolson (147698) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @07:03PM (#14206362) Homepage

      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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rakerman (409507) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:24PM (#14206156) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • my website is #1 on google for "nonsensical paragraphs of poorly written prose"

      Pretty damn good description of my site too :)
    • specialization. Want to be #1 in the industry? Find a niche. Then adapt your webpage content / headers / etc to that niche.

      Other than that, I still don't get what's the big deal with "SEO", like if it was some kind of keyword hacking crap.

    • Re:SEO is BSEO (Score:4, Insightful)

      by flood6 (852877) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:54PM (#14206318) Homepage Journal
      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.

  • 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.
    • Create a popular, interesting site with great content and accessible HTML.

      If you create an unpopular, uninteresting site with mediocre content that no one wants to read, then no amount of gaming the system is going to help.

      As to "real meat", there is no secret magic formula or incantation that's instantly going to rank your personal blog site as #1.

    • This article was nothing more than abstractions. How about some real meat, like exactly how to get your site ranked up there?

      Hence the word beginner's in the title...

  • Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sv-Manowar (772313) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:26PM (#14206164) Homepage Journal
    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
  • '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? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jugalator (259273) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:38PM (#14206226) Journal
    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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  • 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

  • has anyone bothered to keep up with the times? (Score:4, Informative)

    by caffeinemessiah (918089) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @06:49PM (#14206294) Journal
    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.

    • 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

      Another PageRank paper Inside PageRank

      The problem is that PageRank isn't the end-all-and-be-all of Google. Allow me to quote from this SIAM News article [siam.org]

      While Google relies heavily on PageRank for ranking its search results, it uses at least a hundred other metrics as well, making use of such things as the content of "anc

  • Thanks, Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)

    by randfish (937044) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @07:12PM (#14206404) Homepage
    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.
    • Sorry about the site's slowness. We've fixed that and everyone should be able to browse it, no problem now.

      O_o

      You... you make it sound so easy...
      Any upcoming guide for that? :-)

  • Ordered List (Score:3, Funny)

    by whysanity (231556) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @07:19PM (#14206436) Homepage Journal
    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... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aquarian (134728) on Wednesday December 07 2005, @07:44PM (#14206574)
    ...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...
  • 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?
    • 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
    • 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.

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