Understanding SEO

Thursday, 11 March 2010 07:59

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You must have come across a number of content writing companies that throw jargons like “SEO writing,” “keyword density,” and “SERP” at you, which makes you believe that they really know what they're talking about. It's quite possible they do, and it is definitely a good idea to outsource the part of your business which is not your expertise, but it is equally important to understand what these SEO writing vendors are talking about.

SEO, an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, is not a new concept but has lately generated a lot of buzz on the Internet. It is a method used to enhance your search engine ranking by the correct usage of content, keywords, meta tags, and the entire structure of your webpage.

Companies use a number of techniques to achieve this; these techniques are broadly classified into two categories: white hat SEO techniques and black hat SEO techniques. White hat SEO techniques take longer to implement, and as the name suggests, are ethical and ones encouraged by search engines. In fact, results achieved through white hat SEO techniques tend to last longer.

Using black hat SEO techniques can give you faster results but will surely get you in trouble over the long term. Search engine giants are investing billions of dollars in order to make their engines smarter at identifying such websites, and believe it or not, they're getting better at it every day.

Black hat SEO techniques are unethical and dampen user experience, which affects your website in the long even if hypothetically your SEO vendor was smart at keeping you out of trouble with the search engine companies' rules. And if identified by the search engines, your website runs the risk of getting banned, which will have disastrous results for your business. Therefore, you need to be very careful about the SEO company you partner with and understand the difference between white hat and black hat techniques that can be used.

White hat SEO writing techniques:

Building great user/client experience should be the priority of every business and white hat SEO tells you exactly that by suggesting the use of quality content. Content is the ONLY way you can communicate to your customers on the Internet and is one of the major ways your user judges your business.

However, Search Engine Crawlers do not look at your website like your users do, and the page that appears when a user searches for something on a search engine -- called as the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) -- depends entirely on these crawlers. Therefore, while you commission great content, you must also do an adequate research for and include keywords and key phrases that users you wish to target are most likely to search for on search engines. That way, the keywords will help make your content more visible to the crawlers, and the quality of the content will make it appealing for your users. These keywords and key phrases should be used on your website by inserting them in the Title of the page and the articles, Meta Description and Meta Tags, Heading Elements, article body, the alternate text tags on images and URLs, and the title tags on images and URLs.

Using these keywords and phrases in the content is something where a good content service partner will come in handy. A good vendor will be able to supply you articles that use these keywords in the text naturally without making them sound absurd or repetitive -- in other words, the vendor will avoid keyword stuffing. Remember that it is very important to maintain a keyword density of 1% - 5%. Anything over 7% can raise an alarm.

Black hat SEO writing techniques:

People who use Black Hat SEO technique do not believe in user experience. They focus on getting their clients' websites ranked higher on the search engine and use unethical means to do so. One of the simples ways of doing this is by stuffing keywords. It will surely attract search engine crawlers, but when the users take one look at the content, they will run away faster than they arrived. This will affect your website negatively in the long run. Some smarter vendors will use invisible text (for example, using white color for this part of text on a page with a white background. Readers cannot see this text, but the search engine spiders do, and therefore, the rank of the page increases) in the hopes of getting more crawlers to visit them.

Another black hat SEO technique is using fake pages, also known as doorway pages. A user will never be able to see these pages. However, they will be detectable by crawlers who will be tricked to indexing the page higher.

Such black hat SEO techniques do work, but only temporarily. You will not enjoy your position on the search engine result pages for a long time, and eventually, your site will be found and banned.

Even without these threats, business is all about user experience. Use your money wisely, provide people with good content, and hire ethical SEO vendors. That's the only thing that ever works in the long run.

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