SEO is an ever-changing industry . Some of the necessary rules for SEO work are:
1. Web Design – Producing a visually attractive page.
2. HTML coding – Developing search engine-friendly coding that sits behind the web design.
3. Copy writing – Producing the actual readable text on the page.
4. Marketing – What are the actual searches that are being used, what key words actually get more business for your company?
5. An eye for detail — Even the smallest errors can stop spiderbots visiting your site.
6. Patience — There is a time lag on any change you make, waiting is a virtue.
7. IT skills — An appreciation of how search engine programs and the algorithms actually work.
Before worrying about bringing people to your site, you need to get the spiderbots to like your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software used by the search engine companies to crawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and then having reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the sites. Optimizing a website to be Google-friendly is often a compromise between a visually attractive site and an easy-to-find site. The second skill is that of optimizing the actual HTML code to be spiderbot-friendly. Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. This is the writing of the actual text that people coming to your site will read. The Googlebot and other spiderbots love text – but only when written well in properly constructed English. Some people try to stuff their site with keywords, while others put white writing on white space (so spiderbots can see it but humans cannot).
The fourth skill is marketing. After all, this is what we are doing – marketing you site and hence company and products/services on the Web. The key here is to set the site up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most business to you. Some people seem to want to make daily changes and then think they can track the web page ranking results the next day. Unfortunately, it can take a week for absolutely correct changes to take effect, in which time you have made six other changes. Add to this Google’s reticence to allow new sites straight on to its listings by adding a waiting factor of, maybe, three months for new sites, and you have a totally uncontrollable situation.
The final and seventh skill is an appreciation of how search engines and algorithms work, for this where both IT and math experience is useful. People who have programmed at a detailed systems level have a natural feeling for how spiderbots will read a page, what they will search for, what tables they will set up, what weightings they may give to different elements. All of this builds a picture of the database that will be created and how it will be accessed when a search is undertaken. Unfortunately, this skill is the most difficult one to learn because it relies on many years experience of systems programming.
1. Web Design – Producing a visually attractive page.
2. HTML coding – Developing search engine-friendly coding that sits behind the web design.
3. Copy writing – Producing the actual readable text on the page.
4. Marketing – What are the actual searches that are being used, what key words actually get more business for your company?
5. An eye for detail — Even the smallest errors can stop spiderbots visiting your site.
6. Patience — There is a time lag on any change you make, waiting is a virtue.
7. IT skills — An appreciation of how search engine programs and the algorithms actually work.
Before worrying about bringing people to your site, you need to get the spiderbots to like your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software used by the search engine companies to crawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and then having reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the sites. Optimizing a website to be Google-friendly is often a compromise between a visually attractive site and an easy-to-find site. The second skill is that of optimizing the actual HTML code to be spiderbot-friendly. Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. This is the writing of the actual text that people coming to your site will read. The Googlebot and other spiderbots love text – but only when written well in properly constructed English. Some people try to stuff their site with keywords, while others put white writing on white space (so spiderbots can see it but humans cannot).
The fourth skill is marketing. After all, this is what we are doing – marketing you site and hence company and products/services on the Web. The key here is to set the site up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most business to you. Some people seem to want to make daily changes and then think they can track the web page ranking results the next day. Unfortunately, it can take a week for absolutely correct changes to take effect, in which time you have made six other changes. Add to this Google’s reticence to allow new sites straight on to its listings by adding a waiting factor of, maybe, three months for new sites, and you have a totally uncontrollable situation.
The final and seventh skill is an appreciation of how search engines and algorithms work, for this where both IT and math experience is useful. People who have programmed at a detailed systems level have a natural feeling for how spiderbots will read a page, what they will search for, what tables they will set up, what weightings they may give to different elements. All of this builds a picture of the database that will be created and how it will be accessed when a search is undertaken. Unfortunately, this skill is the most difficult one to learn because it relies on many years experience of systems programming.
