Is the future of search about technology?

Or is it about language? The more I examine the results thrown up by search engines, I become increasingly convinced it is more about language. The reason I believe so is a simple observation of how G00GLE, for example, decides on relevance of information. What I mean is that I have had high results for search terms that are not really relevant to my site. The parser had simply found the three or four words in the query in close proximity to each other and decided that this was one of the most relevant answers available. In fact it could not have been further from the truth. Yes it found the words but what did it not find - the context. And this is the main problem, I believe, with search engine technology, it cannot interpret context and that is a crucial matter for finding the correct response to a query.
This, incidentally, is the issue which has plagued the world of automatic translation since its inception as a science. Understanding context. Now I mentioned in the previous paragraph that the parser had simply found the words in close proximity - something which search engines make use of when looking at a web page - the language before and after the keyword which was input. Machine or automatic translation has tried the same techniques in attempting to understand context but this has not been blessed with success.
I think we must face the truth that human lanuage is infinitely more complex than we first realised when we embarked upon ambitous projects in getting computers to translate human language. This remains the barrier with search technology and it is a barrier which will be hard to oversome.

A simple way of getting visitors to your website - (and it's free)

This  method  of  "casting the net" as I call it will only be successful for websites that have at least a minimum of organic traffic - by "organic traffic" I mean  visitors who are finding your site throught search engines and not through paid programms, traffic exchanges, or paid inclusions. The reason for this is simple, the keywords with which visitors find your site on the search engines are the pillars of my strategy.
So now your first question is: how do I know with which keywords people are finding me on search engines? If you do not know this then you should do the following. Sign up with a service which monitors traffic to your webste. I use www.statcounter.com because it is free of charge and supplies me with the information I require to implement my strategy. You sign up with the programm and insert the code it provides you on a page of yoru site.
Now on a daily basis you go to statcounter and by clicking on "Recent Keyword Activity" on the left hand side of the page you will see the traffic that reaches you through search engines and the actual keywords that they used to find you. All you have to do now is put these keywords into the keywords metatag of your site. Additionally you can use these keywords as a hint as to what sort of content you should be including on your site. That's it. try this over a couple fo weeks and tell me your results.

SEO a job for the future - if that's what you believe send me some of what you're smoking

Over the past history of the Internet, which is indeed a short one in relative terms, we have come to be told that Search Engine Optimization is the key to success on the Internet. Well, know what, it isn't. I can optimize most sites with a little patience to get you on the first page of google, and it won't make you any more successful than you are today. The Net has evolved, so have the search  engines and if you are a professional SEO, my advice is retrain fast as you will soon be out of a job.
The web is a pretty fast moving train, just a few years ago the SEO expert could show visible and obvious results to the hungry market and get suitably appreciation and money. Now with social media it's over. The large social media sites incorporate their own optimization so what is the SEO expert going to do with them?
Well, now that the SEO market is vanishing and the skills needed are pretty basic and can be acquired and implemented over a week-end, the SEO experts are busy changing their business cards to SME - SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERTS. That's it. Let us make a real marketing mess of the social media, let's turn twitter into junk mail - we are already doing a pretty good job at that.
And think of all those others - Facebook, etc etc. Let's market the social media where SEO is dead. That's the current reality.

SEO tips - giving images a meaningful name

Sometimes things in life are so obvious that we simply miss the trees from looking at the forest. In search engine optimiation (SEO) this is particularly true of images we use on our website. I have noticed that nine times out of ten the images on a website are usually just given an alphanumerical name like "DSC421". Something worth thinking about and which will certainly help search engines recognise your content is simply to give your images a meaningful name. By that I mean if you are a photographer and have a website instead of the alphanumerical name why not call your image 'evening-view-of-Athens" if it were a photo you had taken of Athens at sunset. Why bother, you ask yourself?
The most important thing to bear in mind is that search engines recognise text, they can index words but they cannot recognise or index pictures or images. Thus if you call your photograph "DSC421" this will mean nothing to a search engine. Should you name the photograph 'image-of-evening-view-of-Athens" then at least the search engine will index this text. This technique I also find useful when I am blogging. To give any blog a little more attractive appeal, it is always wise to include images to break up the text. Here again I name the images in accordance with the context of what I am writing about in my blog post. Anyway, try it yourself and I believe it is something which requires little effort and which you will not regret.

Getting found on the web - work for it!

Let's face the truth - no matter how discouraging it can sometimes be. Today to get found on the web, you have to work for it very hard. That's why we get bombarded with all sorts of offers in our spam box promising to get us high on the search engines in 48 hours, others showing their clickbank and paypal accounts and how they are making thousands of dollars/day. Why, have you ever asked yourself, are these people so anxious to make us rich and not just continue making their daily thousands. The answer is WE ARE their daily thousands - but only if we are stupid enough to believe their get rich quick spiel and chuck $47 or whatever out the window at them. Of course those endlessly long html emails are psychologically well prepared, they have put a lot of thought into them and some of them one could even consider convincing but then again you just ask yourself the question, why do they want to make me rich and see which answers you come up with.
The truth is there is no get rich quick on the Net today and frankly I doubt if there ever was. The answer is a long hard up-hill climb with a website trying all the known ways of legally getting better visibility. There is no other way, believe me. Overnight fame and riches through lnk farms, through clickbank digital products, through SEO scams, through viral marketing, whatever new name these marketeers come up with - it is crap.
The only way to get a market on the Net today is to constantly and consistently work to become an "authority" website - no easy task among the over 100 million sites currently in existence! Building trust with your visitors, that is the only way they will come back gain. Offer good quality information, offer useful information and offer USEFUL information, that is what brings visitors. Do a little test yourself on Twitter and post really valuable info on visibility on the web and yo will be surprised at the number of hungry followers you will get within hours. Everyone wants in on the secret of Internet success. But the answer is not in falling for cheap scams.

Is SEO on its deathbed?

The more one listens to the latest news escaping from google, the more I wonder what the future of search technology will be. Many are already convinced that the original criteria we used to optimize our pages are no longer of interest to an increasingly sophisticated google. For example the idea of the importance of keyword density seems to be fading into the horizon as google's analysis of a site is much more more efficient than a word count and comparing it with the keyword.
Now we hear of google "caffeine" to make its searches more fast and more accurate. It would almost seem as it the concentration in the search engine war is going to be on content - which makes sense. But how will google decide on what is relevant information, how will google rate what is accurate information. Succeeding in doing so will definitely be to the benefit of the google user but will it benefit the website owner?

The Internet paradox - write yes but don't get seen on the web?

There does seem to be a certain paradox in web publishing at the moment and I am wondering what solution the "big boys" are going to come up with. Now the talk is all about social networking - Get on the web and write your blog and twitter and youtube and facebook it. No problem, we have made all the software so easy to use you do not have to be a rocket scientist to publish a reasonable blog. Just come with the ideas and the good content and we will do the rest for you. Great!
But just a thought. That is fine for getting your words of wisdom on the Net but what about finding them? And that is what I mean by the paradox.
Anyone who publishes on the Internet, does with the intention of being read. But what if yo have to spend more time getting visibility for your website than actually creating the contents. This is a very real prospect as publishing becomes easier but getting found on the net gets incrasingly difficult by the day.

Making search engine mistakes I cannot correct.

It is incredibly easy when setting up a blog or a website to make mistakes which cannot be corrected at a later date. I should know because I just did it. One underrated but critically important factor is naming your website. It is highly recommendable to think of how a search engine would treat the name before taking a decision. Let me give you a simple example. I opened a blog which is entitled "Moving to Greece". Nothing wrong with that you might think. You are very wrong. WHY?
Simply because in terms of how a search engine views the title, in terms of search engine rankings I am competing with every removal company in the world which offers house removal services to and from Greece. Naturally I only realised this when I came to look at how my blog was doing on g00gle. And I can now do nothing about it. A blog name cannot be changed and any SEO work I do will still has the disadvantage that my blog will compete with the wrong niche. What is to be learned from the story. When chosing a name for a website - THINK CAREFULLY how search engines might interpret the site name.

Google its really frightening - but true.

We have all come to get used to speaking about one gigabyte of storage space as if this were something of everyday use. Let me give you a comparison to get a perspective on what we are talking about. One byte of information is the storage space we need to store one letter of the alphabet. Let us say that this is the equivalent of one grain of rice. If we are speaking about one gigabyte of information this is enough rice (or, more correctly, bytes) to fill two large containers of this size. Now that is a lot of rice - enough actually to feed everyone in a large city one good meal of rice. But more importantly, what does it take to find two grains of rice in these two containers - then you must have them well marked, I would say. We are talking about exactly the same in terms of search technology. Google, for exmaple, can pick out the two grains from the two containers.
. Now if we leave the gigabyte and the terabyte and come on to the petabyte we are getting into the dimensions that google can relate to. One petabyte in terms of rice is equivalent to 20 ships full of those containers we were talking about. And guess what? Google handles 20 petabytes per day. A lot of rice and a lot of info.

Little wonder their electricity bill is over $1 million per month!

Where are the datarati?

Nice new word, eh. Datarati has just been coined by someone no less than the chief economist at G00gle who was asked recently to predict the skills that will be required of a future work force. His answer? The profession of the future is the statistician - someone who can interpret great laods of facts and figures.
In the context of the Internet he is talking about those who have the technical ability, for exmple, to look at google's website optimizer or google analytics and on the basic of the information contained there make sound recommendations for a business. Through scienticially testing various approaches these statisticians should be able to indiciate what sells and why it sells.
Many would counter such a prediction with scepticism as statistians are not really known to be at the cutting edge of the corporate world. They might be able to interpret data but does this mean they can make clever and profitable business decisions based on this data? I think this is a very good point. You can be a brilliant mathematician but a hopeless businessman.
So a number of questions?
Are the jobs of the future related to the Internet?
Will the life of a business depend on its visibility?
Will search engine optimization growth in importance as a skill and a profession?

Why has the industry left visibility up to the user? Is content king?

This may seem a strange question but there are two sides to every coin. My question could be rephrased. Why is it the task of the website owner to ensure his visibility - this makes the web into one great optimization competition with but a few exceptons. Why do we have to do the work to get visibility?
After all, in the world of the written world before we had the electronic word, the content of the book decided its popularity on that great mental seatch engine of the human race. If a book was good it sold itself - see Shakespeare - still selling - see the Bible - still selling. So is ti fair that you be good on the Internet you really have to know the rules of the search engines to get that much desired and essential visibility. Without that you are lost - like it or lump it.
The essentia point I want to make is that you could be the most gifted author in the world, you could be a possibel Nobel Prize candidate - but will that make you visibile on the net, your content alone?

A question for you ....

I have a site which consists largely of pictures. The site is dedicated to Greek designer underwear - Greek designer underwear. How can I optimize such a site. Every suggestion and idea is welcome.

Is it google's fault that I can't spellllll ?

Off topic again but an interresting one all the same - and from a source which is not a sensationalist one - the Economist. It claims in this week's edition that google, sites like facebook and twitter are having a disastrous effect upon the spelling ability of our children. This set me thinking and basically I came to the conclusion that I have never seen as many misspellings in my life as on the Internet. I have been made consciously aware over the past years that the average level of spelling on the Net is poor. But is this the fault of the Internet? I believe not.
While I do agree that if you are confronted constantly with bad spelling then you will never learn how to spell a word properly if 9 times out of ten you see it misspelt. But I do not believe that it is at fault, I think we must look first and foremost at our school systems. I came from the old system where every night in elementary school I had to learn to spell 20 words. This is a exercise which I think today has vanished from the school curriculum.
Of course, to be fair they are individuals who would also claim that many of us learn visually and that if we are constantly confronted with a common mispelling we will assume eventually that this is the correct spelling. I have no argument to counter this as I do believe that we all learn in very different ways. Yet the social networking sites I visit are mainly populated by adults like myself and they did not learn to spell or misspell only through their use of the Internet in the past ten years.

Duplicate content?

We know that seach engines are aware of the practice of stealing content and in their indexation process they can very efficiently check if similar text exists somewhere else on the Internet. This, I believe, to be a sound policy to avoid plagiarism. But like everything it is not fool proof. Or better said, it has certain shortcomings. The point which worries me is that in certain instances I have been confronted with excellent content for the particular niche my website focuses on. I am tempted at times to quote from this source, duly giving due reference that this is quoted from such and such a source. I fear, however, that no matter what I do to ensure the reader knows I am not the owner of this information, g00gle and other search engines will simply do a trace when indexing, find the text appeared earlier. Usual search engine policy, I believe is to accept the earliest date of publication as the original owner of the material. So if the text is found quoted on my page I will be punished for duplicate content. Is this the way it works presently? Please correct me if I am wrong. The only other alternative I see to avoid the wrath of the search engines is to make a reference to the text in my webpage and link to it. Any other options? Comments welcome!

If my site is good enough visitors will come - REALLY?

The pure search engine optimizer will argue simply that if a site is good enough, it will attract visitors by itself. I wonder what they mean by if a site is good enough. Do they refer to content? search engine optimization? What particular features?
I completely discount this theory that you set up a website and just write and within a tolerable space of time you will have lots of visitors if you have chosen a popular niche. My experience is it simply does not happen.
And in this I am not alone. Basically in 2009 - NOT 1999 - and the web moves faster than we want it on account of the money at stake - your site has little chance of getting seen without constant optimizing, constant updating with quality information, constant searching for new sources of relevant inbound links. In other words visibility of a web site - with few exceptions to the existing 100 something million of them - is and will become increasingly hard to achieve and basically a full-time job. The whole issue of visibility is increasingly becoming a long, slow uphill climb wtih the peak at a formidable distance.
I think we have realised too late that the web has changed our lives in many aspects, the desire for visibility is directly proportional to the importance of the Internet in our daily lives. Actual visibility is inversely proportional to the importance the Internet plays in our daily lives.

My inbound links - impatient or just stupid of me

There is so much good advice around about how to improve your placement on search engines for specific keywords. And I believe that most of this information is useful and well-grounded. My problem is - it does not always work according to the maxims of the SEO textbook. Let me give you an example from my own experience and I await your comments and answers. There is general agreement in the world of search engine optimization that inbound links from quality sites are good for my website. I think few people would disagree with that. So far so good. I decide then to spend some time on placing comments on related forums. In my particular case, I am writing a travel blog so I post an answer to a specific question on a specific travel forum about the country which I am writing about. I even get quite a few reactions and thank you from forum members which would indicate to me that the information I provided was useful to them.
Why, then when I check my inbound links do I have non? The forum I am talking about is a .org site which should even enhance my chances of a good inbound link - but nothing, ziltch?

Ethics on the Net - between a rock and a hard place

This posting will make no sense if you do not read the last one on Internet - quo vadis?
Question - Do you think that private companies have the right to harvest knowledge from my blog and to use it for commercial purposes. Some of you may say well if you do not want such companies to index your content just put a no follow in your html and shut up. I believe that is not the point which I am trying to make. We all have the right to indexation by search engines, to being found on search engines and to getting good traffic from search engines. But can private companies use my knowledge in whatever form and sell it. Currently, in a macro sense it can. I spoke yesterday of filtering of 20 million blogs to predict movie successes.
This means basically I do not own what I am writing, others can make whatever use of this material for commercial purposes, right? So I have no inherent copyright on anything I produce and place on the Internet? right? Hmmmm ...... I have a little trouble with that, I am afraid. I mean g00gle is so fanatical about duplicate content etc. yet it has no trouble offering 20 million blog contents for "research" reasons. Sorry ..... I have a little trouble with that, as well. So obviously g00gle decides what is right and wrong, what is ethical and unethical in terms of copyright? My troubled face persists.
But sadly and basically there is nothing, absolutely nothing, I can do about it.

Should the g00gle algorithm apply to blogs?

I think it is a generally accepted fact that the number of in-bound links a website has, the more g00gle likes it. De facto, it would seem that g00gle assumes that the number of inbound links reflects the quality of the information contained on a particular webpage. One can plead this case but I believe that in the case of blogs, such an assumption can be very wrong. Without wanting to point to specific examples, I know of a blog page which ranks number 1 in g00gle for a popular search term. The blog actually has a total of three pages! Why number one?
Research by data-mining companies shows that unlike regular commercial websites, blogs generally have a large number of outbound links and a far smaller number proportionally of inbound links. Why? I would hazard a guess that the blogger is more interested in his/her content than a commercial site which is hell bent on getting visibility. So blogs are disadvantaged if we assume that the same algorithm goes for blogs as any other site - I believe it does and g00gle cannot automatically identify what is a blog and what is not.
Some may argue the Internet is a level field and blogs should be seen by search engines in the same way as any other website. Anyway, you can also answer by saying what other criteria can the serach engine use to decide on the quality of content. That is an excellent question and one I cannot answer immediately. But I woudl still claim that the importance of inbound links to blogs can distort the realitity in terms of this being a measure of blog content.

Internet and blogs - quo vadis?

The recent rise in social media and social networking through the Internet has interesting repercussions, not all of which are positive, I believe. Let me give you an example of current research which makes me, a simple webmaster and search engine optimizer, feel like a fly trying to scratch its way from the surface to the core of the Internet world - sorry, wrong perspective as we are all being told the Internet does not have a core of center.
I would deny such a statement when I look at the increasing spread of pervasive technologies with companies such as g00gle which, with its myraid email, blogging, search, news services etc. is trying to make itself the center - or one center, of the Internet - and making a damn good job of it if I may say so.
The Internet playing field is no longer level, it is very much tipped to the side of those who have the BIG money - like everything else in life. Basically, it is at present difficult to estimate what is really going on in the Internet and I see it reflecting equally the cycles of the REAL economy. Let me give you a small example.

I just discovered a company which I shall not name. This company can give you any data you want from blogs - it has indexed the full content of some 20 million blogs and is filtering and analysing the content with astounding success in terms of predictions. Blogs, basically, are an expression of individual opinion and with 20 million of them around this opinion covers a lot of topics. Blogs are equally a way of influencing and representing people. So Company X strips off the html and looks at the content, let us say of all blogs about movies. There are a lot.
Then using software which can identify what one would call positive sentiment - simple language parsing I assume - it can actually produce data from these 20 million blogs which gives a fair indication of what people are saying about a particular movie. This info can actually predict what the popularity of a particular movie will be in one week's time and has a success rate of some 86%.
Such is the current state of data mining from a blog like this one, amplified 20 million times. Now, without being paranoid, I can understand why we are all encouraged to blog, why we are given free tools to do so. The result is a billion dollar industry which is predicting successfully the future in the way I describe. What level of sophistication can such technology achieve? How ethical is such work? Are we busy creating monsters that are going to destroy us? I assume what applies to movies, as in the example I give, can also apply to cars, food, fashion - you name it.

Is g00gle human ? - responding to Terry and Tony's comment on my last post on g00gle

Yesterday in my post I mentioned how I was afraid of the power of g00gle. Tony and Terry have posted an interesting comment.
"Google has indexed my blog posts has been about 3 hours and I thought that was already impressive. It is a pity that some sites aren't found so easily, but does that not come down to better site SEO being needed for those sites? I know Google is raking in some enemies, but I like them, and hope they continue to be good to me."
.
I think the point I was making was not really a criticism of g00gle, I just wanted to point out that if g00gle can find out within three minutes that I as one of 100 million sites, has been updated, this is more than impressive, it is frightening simply in terms of the sophisticated technology it has at its disposal. Yes, of course it is super efficient and I agree with you that better site SEO provides better g00gle results. Quality content, frequent updating and good seo work are the basic pillars today of getting found on an search engine. I also believe that is just and fair. I just wonder in another 10 years what will be the technological power of G00GlE?
However, when you consider that g00gle's evaluation of websites has to be automated on account of the sheer quantity of sites, will automated assessment of the relevancy, quality and usefulness of information ever compare to human judgement? Or is this automated assessment already accepted as human judgement?

My perception of the strongest search engine - how I see it

The more I think about the evolution of g00gle in the ten something years of its existence, the more sceptical I get. I actually greet the news that Microsoft and Yahoo are going to team up in search engine technology development and try and take on g00gle. Firstly a monopoly position which g00gle is gradually getting in the market is unhealthy for all of us. The g00gle monster has spread from being a search engine to groups to email to blogs, slowly buying up anything which will refine its position on the market.
What frightened me a couple of days ago and what I discovered by pure coincidence - I wrote a post for one of my blogs and it was indexed by g00gle within four minutes. Think about that - it may be partly coincidental but I am not the most important blog in the world where g00gle is waiting for every precious update that comes from my Greel keyboard and there are over 100 million sites which need indexing - but four minutes - not bad.
This shows me that their currently technological state is so far ahead of anything I have ever seen before on the net. Or how would you explain it?

Keywords and g00gle - who knows?

Currently there seems to be a lot of debate amond webmasters about the significance of keyword density, i.e. the ratio of a keyword to the number of times it appear in the text of a page. Of course, those selling software tracking keyword density etc remain obviously convinced that keyword density still matters while others are saying that g00gle could no longer care less about keyword density. Who does one believe?
Good question, I believe. Personally I think that while still being careful with the whole issue, g00gle has adopted more sophisticated means of trying to trick it and that keyword density has today little or nothing to do with your g00gle ranking. Why do I think so? Simply from my own experience with my own websites. I have a blog which ranks number two in g00gle for the keywords I wanted, yet I did not give a hoot about keyword density on any single page of the website. At least this shows me that it is not a life or death issue for search engines and that other factors must play a more important role. Which? This I cannot even hazard a guess at. One thing I am convinced of, though, is the fact that high quality content and constant updating does catch the eye of search engines. How? No idea!

A word of warning on keywords

Now that we have learned that keywords - the words you choose for search engines to find your site - are fundamental to getting web traffic, I have to issue a word of caution.
Some bright sparks might come up with the clever idea of putting every conceivable keyword which is relevant to the topic on that particular web page. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY BAD IDEA and google and all search engines will punish you. This practice is know as keyword stuffing and when a google bot discovers this on your pages it will get rather angry.
Just like years ago when people used to put keywords in white print on a white page. Those days of fooling the search engines are long past. Below you will see an example of what is known as keyword stuffing.
Take a careful look at this long list and you will see what I mean. Doing this is a total disaster. For a start the search engine also checks the text ont he page to see if these terms appear and if they don't, boy are you in trouble.

Lesson number six Never stuff your pages with keywords

Looking for relevant quality link exchanges to other blogs

By the way, if anyone has a blog related in any way to this one and is interested in exchanging links, please leave your details in the comments box below and I will be right back to you.

Keywords - the mistakes for optimizing your site

Let us come back again for one post on the issue of keywords and how fundamentally important they are for getting visibility for your site. If you have forgotten, take a look back at the first posting here on keywords. So it is largely through the search engine indexing your keywords that you appear on thesearch engine and the skill with which you use these keywords also tells in deciding your ranking on the search engine. COming back again to Charlie's major mission to sell plastic cups on-line. We agreed that plastic cups is a great keyword for Charlie. But remember we also discovered on a particular search engine that there were just over 24 300 000 sites mentioning "plastic cups". So we need to be a little more creative with our keywords. Why reinvent the wheel - let's see which site is first on a search engine among the 24 million, then take a look at the page source and actually this is what you will find:
plastic drink cups, plastic tumblers, plastic wine glasses, plastic beer mugs
So this guy has several keywords related to plastic cups. And, Charlie, know what? we should do the same. Some examples: reusable plastic cups, plastic cups for hot drinks, real looking plastic cups, - OK not bad but you have to think of what the surfer could be looking for when looking for plastic cups. If you can't come up with so many ideas (And admittedly plastic cups is not the most inspiring) there are lots of free software around on the web which will give you synonyms for the keyword you are trying to optimize. Take a look here for keyword software and this site contains great free keyword tools to help you as well.

Lesson number five Get aware of the many free tools out there to help you optimize for keywords.

So if not link farms how do I get inbound links?

Come on, Charlie, we need a little imagination here. There are forums and directories all over the place which are related to your topic. And something I forgot to mention and is really important, the inbound link is valuable if it comes from a site dealing, in your case, with plastic cups. And if it is a really important site in the eyes of the search engine, then it is even more valuable.

So now we have to do a bit of research on the net, we start looking for forums on the beverage industry for example, then we sign up and start posting USEFUL not spam comments to these and we can add our url - Bingo you will have your first inbound link. So as you can see, this is going to take a bit of work. But Rome was not built in a day and finding two or three relevant forums to post a link per week is much more worthwhile than 30 irrelevant links which the search engines will just discount. That would be a complete waste of your time, Charlie. The image at the top shows hot popular forums have become over time on the net and people depend upon them heavily to exchaneg information, contacts, etc. You would be a fool not to use them.

Off-site optimization to get traffic to your website

So yesterday we set our goals to a plan - off-site optimization and on-site optimization and we are going to start with off-site optimization today. This neat little pic shows something I mentioned in the earlier post, Charlie - getting links into your site - you are the red one in the center, Charlie, from other websites. AH, you say, even I have heard about that so I will save myself the trouble and go to a link farm and pay my $19.99 for 135 links to my site.
Charlie that is a great idea if you want your website to disappear from the search engines - such tricks might have worked five years ago but not today. Google and other search engines are clever, very clever old beasts. They can trace if you have links from link-farms and if you do the search engines get very angry because they feel you are cheating. And yes, you are cheating. Secondly if you have no inbound links today and 135 tomorrow, the beasts will raise an eyebrow and think - that's strange, so many inbound links so quickly.

What the search engines really want to see is organic growth of inbound links. By that I mean 1 this week, two next week, 5 next month, 25 by the end of the year. This is assumes is a natural progression and rewards it accordingly.

Lesson number four Never ever buy inbound links to your site, you will regret it.

Our SEO plan has two columns to it

There are two fundamental things you have to understand about SEO and always bear this in mind. There is:

on-site optimization, and

off-site optimization.


All this means is that you can do things to your website to make it more search engine friendly (on-site) and you can do things on the web (off-site) to make your site more attractive. Yes, Charlie I understand your confusion, how can you do things on the web to make your site more visible.
Too complicated to go into now in detail, Charlie but let me give you a simple example. If other sites put a link to your site, that is good for you. If it comes from a site that is also selling or talking about plastic cups that is even better for you. Search engines see it this way, each site that links into your site - called an inbound link - the search engine sees as a vote for your site. The more votes you gather the more popular your site.
So Charlie enough for today, tomorrow we are going to make a list of all the things you can do on the web to help your site and when we have done that we will make a list of all the things you can do on your website to get serach engines to like it.
Oh, by the way, Charlie, that planned vacation is not on the SEO plan, you have work to do - a lot of work, Charlie.

Planning to optimize your site

So, we need a plan, Charlie. Ideas? OK, let's look at it this way. Search engines do not find your site, strictly speaking, they are actually more interested in something called 'keywords". For this site selling plastic cups, obviously a lot of our keywords would work on that variation. You see search engines have things called bots, these are just pieces of software that visit all the sites on the Internet and index data from this site. And there are many many things you can do on your site that will give search engines a very clear idea of what your site is all about. And don't forget, Charlie, search engines cannot read pictures or images, they can only read text. After all when you go to a search engine to look for a flight to New York from Buffalo you will probably type in "cheap flights Buffalo New York". You never type in a website, do you? These words you type in are keywords. So if you had them well placed on your site, there is a much better chance of the search engine showing your site to the surfer, get it? Anyway, Charlie, we are jumping the gun, a bit here. We want a plan and keywords will be a fundamentally important part of that plan.

Getting traffic to your site - let's start at the beginning

Yipe, Charlie, sorry but I understand you feel a little confused. That great website, that even better business idea with the plastic cups and now no visitors to that super website which sells them. Let's take this step by step, Charlie and see if we can work something out. You made the simple mistake of think when you have a website half the world will visit that. Well, charlie, if it is any consolation, you are not alone . About 500 000 other website owners did exactly the same. In brief we need a plan. And this plan, Charlie is going to look at how we can realistically and without spending your last dime, get some initial traffic to view those great plastic cups, OK?

Lesson number three Make a plan on how you are going to make your site visibel on the Internet

Getting traffic - it ain't easy

The point I am trying to make is that creating and publishing a website is only the start of a lot of long hard work if you want to succeed in selling plastic cups on the Internet. The sad fact for Charlie - and I just tried it on google - there are a total of 23 300 000 sites indexed for "plastic cups". Charlie has a problem would you nto agree? And hence again the title of my blog "SEO matters". Without doing the right things - and keep doing them constantly - you are never, never going to get visibility on the net because the largest percentage of Charlie's traffic will come from the search engines - where else?

Yikes, Charlie has got himself into something more than he bargained for, he just realises. So what can he do about it. Inspiration strikes. I'll look up SEO services on a search engine and see if they can help me. Wow, Chairlie you are a genius and just look what you came up with. "Guaranteed - your site on the first page of google in 48 hours" Just pay the $97 and that takes care of the problem. Charlie, think, hold on a minute, even you can figure out that if it only takes $97 dollars we would all be on the first page of google. Hmmm, good point.
Actually Charlie, can I give you a piece of advice. I have worked in SEO for 7 years and if you were to offer me $97 000 dollars I could never guarantee that your site would be on the first page of google in 48 hours, days, weeks or even months!

Lesson number 2 Do not throw your money out of the window at SEO quacks offering ridiculous google rankings for next to nothing.

Where do sites get their traffic from? Heaven?

Nope, money does not grow on trees and heaven is not goign to rain down upon your website thousands of visits eager to buy Charlie's plastic cups. Actually, going back to the site name the user would not have a clue that Charlie is into selling plastic cups big time.

So back to my original question. Where do site get their traffic from? Come on, where? Yipe you got it. Most healthy sites get their traffic from search engines. Google, for example, handles some 20 million searches per hour - and even soem of those could be for plastic cups. So Charlie, simple, off you go and let google know you exist on the website and submit your url. Great! Nope, sorry Charlie but by the time google gets around to indexing your pages, plastic cups could be a thing of the past so you will have to do better than that!

Now you have the website - but where's the traffic?

It would seem logical to me that anyone who has a website, has it for a reason - basically to be seen ont he Internet. But building and publishing a website is peanuts - the issue is who is going to find it. The honest answer is - unless you make certain efforts to get visibility - no one will find your website. Do not forget there are over 101 million(1) websites out there so what precisely makes you think they are going to find yours. Virtually impossible.


Next logical question - how do people find websites? Well if you are not amazon.com or a big name no one is going to know that charlie Bloggs has set up (what he considers to be) a fantastic site called www.charliebloggs.com and is going to corner eccommerce sales on "plastic cups". In fact dear Charlie has already made a first mistake and is totally unaware of it. The website name www.charliebloggs.com has absolutely no relevance to what he is going to sell - plastic cups. Now if charlie had been a little more clever he would have done a little research under sites where you can register a domain name and might have been lucky enough to get a domain name like www.plasticcups4u.com. That we will see later would have given him a distinct advantage.

Lesson number 1 Pick a website names that has some relevance to the topic of your site.

SEO matters - what is in a name?

Hi all, so what do I mean seo matters. First and foremost this blog is for site owners who wish to use every legitimiate means available to get their site seen among te other some 101 million websites out there on the web. SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. So why does it matter that we bother with this complicated stuff. Simply because it really does matter. Here you will learn how a search engine and not a human views your web pages, you will learn what search engines like to see and thus improves your ranking and ultimately your visibility on the web.

This blog is a spin off from another blog I am running on a similar but different topic. I have a blog on traffic exchanges and how useful or useless they are are bringing targeted traffic to your website. Over the past months I noticed I was getting off topic on traffic exchanges and focusing more on search engine optimization issues. Since it makes more sense to be focused on a blog, hence this new baby, seo matters.

So if you are interested and serious about getting more traffic, I tell you now be prepared to invest - not money, but time and patience in getting your website higher listed on Google, Yahoo etc. Be warned - this is work.