SEO – Search Engine Optimization & Placement

Web page optimization has been around since the days of the directories. Submission to the directories involved sending an email to the directory administrator in order to alert him or her to the fact that you had a web page that needed to be added.

After a period of time, the directory administrator would pay your web page a visit, and note it’s genre in order to be added to it’s respective category. As time went on and the internet began to grow at a greatly increased pace, humans had difficulty trying to stay caught up with the enormous amount of web pages that were being produced, so they invented an automated system to review the website submissions for them.

Enter The Search Engine

In the beginning, search parsing utilities were pretty good at listing a web page, but they were extremely limited in their capacity to rank a website page in their indexes. Picking up on the fact that the page was there was about all these early parses could do. Various coding languages like JavaScript, and Flash, for instance, couldn’t be read. We needed Meta Tags to let the parsing agent know what the page was all about. Not too unlike the days of the directories, it was up to us to help the parsing utility to figure out where the page needed to be in the search engine index. We even still had to alert the search engine of our website’s existence through a form for submission. Index listings automation was so new in fact, we found ourselves having to hand feed it any instructions it needed to have in order for our websites to show up where we wanted them to show up.

Search Engine Optimization

As time went on, and as the internet grew, there were even less people online than ever before that knew how to present a web page to a search parsing utility in order for it to be properly listed in the index. A whole cottage industry sprung up around the business of optimizing and preparing web pages to be listed in the internet search indexes. Today we call them SEO’s (search engine optimizer) — Web Developers, in the early days got to be so good at manipulating the innocence of the search engine, that one rarely ever found what they were looking for during search. As it was in the days of the directories, these up and coming search engine technicians and engineers had to find ways to prevent the abuse that their indexes were receiving. They began to write filters to clean up the results.

Spamdexing

Google was a pioneer in the field of combating what became known as Spamdexing — The more filtering that occurred, the harder the spammers worked to override the filters.The battle to keep the indexes clean goes on – even today.

Big search, like Google for instance, started to look at the validity of a website on it’s own, independent of what Web Developers and Webmasters said about the site through the use of Meta Tags and Keyword Content. Google began to look at things like the actual coding and markup of the site, it looked at whether or not the entity being presented was even real by researching at the state and local levels for licensing and permitting. Google looked at things like Privacy and Terms of Use policies — Focused on contact information like phone numbers and actual real-time street addresses.

Major indexes are looking at websites these days as more of an augmentation to their real-world counterparts — sort of a virtual brick and mortar, if you will. If a website isn’t coded properly, or doesn’t contain valid real world information like address, phone, and licensing, then you can be assured that your ranking is going to suffer to a very certain extent — add to that where your site might be hosted — Google found that most legitimate businesses on the internet broadcasted from dedicated ip addresses, and the sites weren’t found often to be hosted in known blacklisted ip ranges.

Real business has a certain attitude and a way they present themselves on the internet — If the business person is serious about his or her online presence, it’ll show, and major search will respond accordingly with the appropriate listings and according to the genre of the business itself.

A full 90% of any potential website optimization occurs during the initial web development processes. Most people who might claim to be SEO’s will vehemently disagree with, and argue that point with me, but facts being what they are, in a world full of spamdexers, phishers, keyloggers and drive by downloads, we’ll find the search engines of the world doing many of the same kinds of things that the directory admins did so many years ago. The directories of the days of old innovated, and automated search parsing — now the existing search engines are innovating yet again, by eliminating, through the use of automation, spam in their indexes.

What about the other 10%? — Once the website solution has been developed and deployed, it falls to the owner of that solution to keep it active. Whether they do it themselves, or hire a professional webmaster service, doesn’t matter. The platform the site resides on needs to be updated now and again, html standards have to be maintained — If the coding language for the site changes, i.e. from html 4.0 to html 5.0, then the site coding itself needs to be changed or otherwise rewritten to reflect the changes. Site owners who have to worry about keeping constantly fresh content in the site of search engines like Google should have a blog to post in every day. Otherwise, Google already knows who you are and what you do, and your site is only really ever going to be found in the regional sense any way, so any further manipulation of the content will likely trigger a filter or two, and the listing will drop.

It’s Up To You

Okay, so what about the real search engine optimization? — Well, if you hired a good developer to deploy your website solution for you, then you’re nearly almost there. The rest is essentially up to you.

Google already knows how your site is being presented. Now it’s time for you to become engaged. There are no magic bullets to being listed tops in the indexes — either you have a service or a product that everybody likes and wants, or you don’t. Most people are just fortunate to have some kind of following, and they appear to do alright — activity and engagement on your behalf is what’s going to drive your exposure and your traffic. If you find your website visitor-ship suffering, then maybe it’s about time to engage people, in real time, with advertising, business cards, or just plain good old conversation.

As your internet web developer, I’ll use all of my skill and years of experience to help get you most of the way there — but be reminded, that your overall success depends on you and your ability to make yourself known to those who might not otherwise know you or your product in the real world — all of your real site traffic comes from the ‘real world’ and in real time — Getting legitimate, actual page viewing visitors into your site is a major step toward seeing yourself and your site or business on the first page of Google.