Adventures in SEO
by Sapphire (February 8, 2005)
It’s time to talk about search engine optimization. Whether you’re making a page to sell your company’s revolutionary new product that’s going to make White-Out look like a marginally successful invention, or you’re blogging about your cat, Irene, eventually it happens: you start wondering about your stats. Who’s visiting my site? What are they looking at? How are they finding it?
Obviously, if you hope to make money from your site, you want to position it so the search engines will drive traffic to it. They may not be the only source of traffic on the web, but you can’t have a serious web presence without them. And even if your site’s not about money - maybe it’s about a cause you care about, or your dreams or hobbies or your writing or your art - you still want to reach people. That’s the beauty of the web. Anybody who can get access to a computer hooked to the internet can reach anyone else hooked up to the web. Finally, we’re all getting our 15 minutes of fame.
So I’ve opened a section here on SEO - search engine optimization. It’s something I first studied back in 1998-1999, before Google had quite established itself as the prime SE on the web. Things were a bit different then, but not much. On-page optimization seemed more important than it does now, but off-page optimization - getting quality links from others - was essential even then. But it was viewed more as a way to get direct traffic than a way to get higher rankings. That had changed by the end of 1999. I can’t remember just when Yahoo started selling its $299 non-guaranteed submissions into its directory, but it caused quite a stir at the time.
Still, the more things have changed, the more they stay the same. And good SE business sense is not much different than offline business sense. I’m no guru, and you shouldn’t take my opinions as anything but my opinions, but I hope what you find here will get you thinking, help you form your own theories and ideas. Lesson #1 in search engine optimization: listen to everyone, but don’t assume anyone knows what they’re talking about. Use your common sense.
Posted in SEO
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