Search engine optimization has become a mystery to many business owners. Why won’t their site rank in search engines for terms that are important and relevant to their business? Why does it seem like other sites always rank higher for these terms?

As Tom Brokaw said on his final newscast, don’t be afraid of the questions, be afraid of the answers. Most often the answer is that your Web site is now providing the search engines with the proper data to be properly indexed. Things like Javascript, DHTML, and dynamic URL strands can cause a search engine spider to miss critical pieces of information on your Web page.

Before we get into tackling specific issues as to how to get your Web page better read, I want to deal with the myth of search engine optimization. SEO needs to be demystified for people to really understand the value. This may seem odd coming from USWeb. After all, we are among other things, a SEO firm. USWeb wants to educate people on SEO because once our clients and prospects understand it, the clearer choice we become. Once they understand the amount of work that we put into providing results to our clients, they will look no further for a provider. Trust me; our dispensing of advice is purely self-serving!

Any firm that tries to sell you on optimizing your site, and won’t tell you how they will do it, is simply selling snake oil. Get to understand the specifics on how search engines work, and especially their terms and conditions. Here are some great books to start out with.

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
(This book is an amazing crash course. If you’re considering hiring a search engine optimization firm, read this book first. If nothing else, it will help you weed out the fluff.)

Search Engine Visibility
(Sheri Thurow wrote an amazing book here. This is a great book if you have a simple, static Website and want to learn how to write better for search engines.)

Some required reading is the guidelines page for Webmasters from Google:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Live by this page. Read through all the Google pages for Webmasters and you will see that Google wants your content. All search engines want your content, that’s what makes them valuable. Just remember what makes a search engine valuable is the amount of pages and the relevancy of those pages. It all comes down to user experience. Search engines want to know that when they index your site, you are going to provide a positive user experience. That doesn’t mean you have to have a great Website, or even a good design. It simply means that you have relevant content for the user who searched.

The myth of SEO that is perpetuated by many SEO firms is that Search optimization is something you can’t do yourself. This is untrue. Learn about the search engines by reading their guidelines. Check out chat rooms like SEOChat.Com. Look at the sites ranking for terms you’re interested and look at what they have on their site. You can even download the original Google algorithm on the Web. Search engine optimization is not a mystery and there is no secret sauce. SEO is less about algorithms than about writing good content and getting relevant links.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.