News & Articles > Webdesign and Development

The SEO secret

Added 10th of December 2007

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Search Engine Optimization is a well discussed subject, but the reality of the matter is - nobody, (apart from those involved in developing algorithms for the major search engines) really knows how to fully influence the indexing process so to attain a high page rank.

Common SEO techniques

There are plenty of methods to improve your page rank:

• Identify one or two keywords or phrases for each page on your website.
  
• Put each keyword or phrase at the beginning of the title tag on each page.
  
• Ensure that the keyword or phrase is mentioned close to the beginning of the meta description.
  
• Also apply them to the header tags, put them in bold or italic or bullet points.
  
• Use your keywords or phrases in the page file's name or folder name.
  
• Use them also in the alt and title tags.
  
• Ensure that your keywords or phrases are frequent, but not over-present in the body of your copy.
  
• Completely avoid the employment of black-hat techniques at all costs.
  

Global SEO

I'm sure you have seen the above list a thousand times; you may have religiously followed every method, but still are a long way to the coverted no.1 position on Google or Yahoo.

Here are a few important SEO points:

• Ensure that you have plenty of one-way, in bound links.
  
• Let pages flow to and from each other in a related themes, i.e.: Tents>Outdoor equiptment>Outdoor clothing. Having lots of unrelated pages will not make an page rank impact. Try and establish non-tenuous page connections.
  
• Provide rich content that people want to read. If you do this, people will gladly provide one-way, in bound links.
  
• Be honest.
  

The future of SEO

We know that using tricks and traps to manipulate our page result will influence the search engines for a brief period, but understand that there really is no 'golden goose' into SEO success.

Whether we are using black or white-hat techniques, there are so many websites out there, how can we ever succeed in beating the competition? Well, I'd say firstly, most of your competition cares little about SEO, secondly your best chances of success now lie not in SEO (which is of course important), but in the content that you provide.

Think about it. A search engines job is to provide relevant results to the user. It will crawl from page to page, site to site looking for good keywords and phrases to add to it's growing index. The search engines wants to find rich content, that above all is honest and not full of trickery and technique.

The future of search engine optimization lies less in technique and more in content. So, focus less on your SEO campaign and turn your attention to your writing skills. The bells and whistles of SEO should be regarded more as a standard way of coding good HTML, the emphasis should always be on providing your visitor with an enriching experience.