What To Avoid In Search Engine Optimization
3rd May 2006
A business which wanted to have a piece of “land” in cyberspace surely planned to be successful. The first major step, of course, was to build the website. The second is to find a good web host. But once everything is in place, the traffic to the website is nil or zero. The main reason for this is that the existence of the website was never known. The website does not appear in the listings of search engines.
To solve the dilemma, the website must be reviewed and analyzed. The contents may need rewriting and the web design may need improvements. These are all activities geared towards search engine optimization.
With search engine optimization, the website gets listed in a Search Engine’s results page each time an Internet user types in a keyword of the website. Being part of the list makes the presence of the website known to the public. And being found at the top of the list is similar to being recommended by the search engine.
Unfortunately, some websites fall victim to gimmicks or tricks of people who are simply out there to spread trouble. For example, these unscrupulous people send emails claiming that they finally found the technological secret to haul a website to the top of the list of Search Engines. Obviously, this is a hoax or a false claim. But many owners of websites, especially the new ones, are convinced by their emails.
The truth is that the methods employed by Search Engines in finding websites and ranking them are closely guarded trade secrets. In the interest of public information, a web-crawler Search Engine will simply state that they are employing an algorithm, specially designed by the technical staff. On the other hand, the people behind a human-powered Search Directory will state that they evaluate website descriptions sent to them. In other words, there is no technological secret to bring a website to the top of a Search Engine list.
Another gimmick meant to destroy websites is the junk email that offers to improve the website rankings. All the website owner needs to do is to follow the instructions sent in the next email. Perhaps, a certain link should be added to the website so that its ranking will go up. But when a website company responds to this junk email and follows the instruction, the website may become connected to a spam site, which is banned by many Search Engines. This leads to the removal of the website from the Search Engine’s list.
The real search engine optimization begins with an examination of the website. Optimization has three main activities:
- Creating original and well-written web page content
- Selecting the right keywords to target on a web page
- Conducting a strategic optimizing of the HTML code
When none of the above activities are offered by a person claiming to help improve the positioning of a website, the website owner should ignore that person.