There are no shortcuts to effective SEO

September 24, 2004

Ask anybody that has been involved with professional search engine optimization (SEO) for a reasonable amount of time and they will all tell you that effective SEO is a never-ending and very time-consuming process that takes months if not years to be truly powerful and effective.

Without a permanent and standard optimization program in place, satisfactory and reliable search engine ranking results are impossible to attain.

In just about any field or venue, there are some people that constantly try to find fast and easy ways to accomplish certain tasks, without going through all the necessary steps to do these tasks properly and fail to follow the normal procedures.

In SEO, trying to attain permanent and high quality results with so-called “quick fixes” is just an illusion that some people fall into, either from lack of knowledge or not having the right tools at their disposal.

How are search engine rankings determined?
It is impossible to really understand how SEO works without having some basic knowledge of how search engines work in the first place.

There are still many people that believe every time a search is made using a search engine, that the entire Web is systematically searched in order to find an answer that best matches the search query.

No engine searches through the entire Internet when someone does a search on any subject or topic of interest.

When an individual searches for a particular website in any search property, they are effectively searching only the information that search engine currently has available in its own master database.

Although most search engine crawlers do spider and index a huge amount of websites and pages on the Web when they actually go out for new sites to index, it is nearly impossible for them to find all sites on their own.

However, they can and will find a website if another in their database links to it and they can also find a site if the site's owner or webmaster specifically directs them to it via the search engine's "Add URL" form.

Once a search engine crawler has found a new site, it indexes what it detects to be the most relevant information from it and finally places this pertinent data in its database.

Today, all search engines use various and complex algorithms that can vary greatly in the way they operate. However, most search engine's crawlers or spiders will analyze, index and finally catalogue websites based on their own complex and proprietary formula.

All major search engine crawlers are effectively programmed to look at the content of individual websites. In this case, content is defined as text only.

All search engines today are “picture blind” meaning they cannot read or understand information in a picture, photograph, graphic or drawing of any kind.

In consideration of all of this, if a site is lacking three or four easy-to-understand, keyword-specific paragraphs of targeted content that effectively describes what the site is all about, the search engine crawlers will most probably be ill-informed by the inconsistency between some of the content in the meta tags and the content in the actual body of the text itself.

Most search engines today don’t even look at meta tags anymore, but the ones that still do expect to see pretty much the same keywords and key phrases that were placed in the meta tags to be repeated in the body of the text.

They will index whatever they can find that appears to them to be relevant, such as keywords that were in the text more than twice (keyword density), words or small phrases that appeared in headings or titles or keywords that were within a hyper-text link pointing to that site.

This all boils down to this: if you haven't devoted sufficient energy and time to really create a website with great, rich content that is of good use to all your users, you probably will not get the beneficial, long-term results you are expecting. Search engine optimization is a science as well as an art.

Plan for long-term results
One word about meta tags: if you are truly lucky, you could inadvertently get one or two higher search engine rankings with one or two engines by simply editing your meta tags but, these will all be an illusion and will most likely yield deceptive results in the best of cases.

Today, all major search engines change their algorithms regularly, and, as soon as they do, there's a very good chance your “temporary” high rankings will turn into “permanent low-rankings” if the body of your text and your pages are not properly optimized for their respective keywords and key phrases.

Look at the successful optimization of your website as a long-term investment- one that will yield secure and long-term dividends, without taking any substantial amount of risk. Some helpful hints to better optimize your site could be:

As stated above, make certain your site is not designed with pictures or graphics alone, as any such website cannot be spidered at all by any of the search engines.

Also, make certain to write only natural, easy-to-understand language that will effectively transmit the topic or message of your website and also include keyword and key phrases you want your site to rank high for.

Additionally, be certain that all your title tags, description tags, meta tags and alt tags are all “in sync” with the visible copy on each of your pages. Also, arm yourself with a lot of patience.

Today, most search engine crawlers are at times very slow to index new content or information that they discover when spidering any websites. At first, don't despair if it takes three months or even more to see the results of all the hard work you have done so diligently.

Always remember that you are building for the long-term, and as such, if it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing it the correct, recommended way.

(Updated from our June 1999 article)

Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 1999

Unless otherwise specified, all content and material on this site is copyrighted by Serge Thibodeau of rankforsales.com and may not be reproduced by any means without express written permission. Using my content without permission is a theft of my work. Please contact sthibodeau@rankforsales.com to discuss certain reprint options that would be acceptable.

You can read some of Serge Thibodeau's exclusive comments that are not posted on this website. Visit his personal blog by clicking here. For hardware, software or IT-related technology questions, it is recommended you visit www.techblog.org

We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. The keywords you think are the best may be totally different than the ones recommended by WordTracker. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

        

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.