Free SEO Tips the Pro’s Charge For (Part 3)
This article is by Michael Cooper and he is a computer/internet/technology enthusiast. He has been building websites since 1996 and has been using SEO for years to help drive traffic to his and his client’s sites. For some recommended SEO software, visit http://seosoftware.topconsumerproductreviews.com so that it can help you with the above tasks. To hire him for SEO/SEM/VM, you can contact him at http://nosquaresoftware.com.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s dive into the two ways to optimize your site.
On Page Optimization
This is what most people think of when they think of SEO. In reality it is the less effective of the two methods, though as Google improves its ability to determine real content from fluff it is getting more valuable. A bit of history first.
Back when people started realizing that they could make or break their business by where they came up in the SERPs, they started adding all sorts of content to their sites to improve their ranking. The most common of these was the meta keywords. These are words that are placed in the code on a website that tell the search engines what the site is about. Way back when the ‘net was young, the search engines believed these keywords. They don’t anymore. People abused the keywords system by putting their competitors names in them, or by even putting completely bogus words in. A site looking to sell more jeans would put Britney Spears in their keywords to get people to visit them inadvertently. Needless to say, keywords play very little importance anymore. I have gotten sites to the #1 position on Google without using keywords at all.
As the search engines got wise to the whole bogus keywords thing, they started looking at all of the content on a website. They can only read text, so images and animated graphics (like flash) were ignored. People learned tactics to place all sorts of text on their site that was invisible to users, but that the search engines (looking at the source code) would see. So search engines started to distrust the websites themselves.
Filed under: Webmasters
