This week we finally began digging into the SEO section of our course. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This means using certain techniques in order to get your website out to the people who are looking for it. This means working with search engines. A search engine is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where those keywords were found. According to SEOcertification.org, 80% of website visitors come from search engines. Our society's top search engine is none other than Google itself.
Google is a crawler based search engine and is made up of 3 parts: crawler or spider, index, and search engine software. Search engines find sites 2 different ways, either by accepting listing sent by webmasters or by crawlers scanning. Google itself has 4 spiders, which can crawl 100 pages per second. All the while they are cataloging the information presented in the webpages. There are on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page factors are keyword targeting, HTML tags, content, anchor text and URL. Off-page factors include link building, link popularity and anchor text.
Several people have tried to trick google's spiders by spamming. Types of spamming include keywords unrelated to site, redirects, keyword stuffing, mirror-duplicate content, tiny text, doorway pages, link farms, cloaking, keyword stacking, gibberish, hidden text, domain spam, hidden links, mini-micro-sites, page swapping (bait and switch), and typo spam and cyber squatting. While all of these might sound attractive to someone trying to get their website out there, search engines aren't falling for it. They are constantly setting up barriers and banning sites that use these kind of practices.
So bottom line,
follow the rules and do good work. And the rest will come on its own.
Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend,
-Caitlin Campbell
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