Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Optimization’
Some of the search engine optimisation process involves the writing of documents for dissemination to blogs as a way of promoting a website and building its search engine positioning. This is a problem for some commentators: there is the assumption that search optimization feature writing is only generating spam. Naturally this opinion is decried by search optimisation practitioners.
There is a lot of content out on the web that is of poor quality, but this can originate from any number of producers – it may not consciously be spam, it could just be badly written content created by the website owners. The search engines are continually developing to do what they can to weed out poor content but some will always be found. A good optimisation specialist will be concentrating on producing worthwhile content – search optimization is not definitely to at fault. Some industries are more prone to poor content than others, but it is probably not intentional.
The documents written to promote a company’s website do need to be as well written as the content of the website’s actual pages. The documents need to highlight numerous keywords that have been selected for emphasis but still without resorting to unethical habits. The documents still have to illustrate the importance to the website they are promoting.
It is true that some search requests will produce lots of entries with a high search engine positioning for sponsored adverts by organizations with special offers. These will inevitably be followed by entries from price comparison websites. You cannot blame search optimization for that. In many cases it is the result of good optimisation by a company. A search query for a car spares outlet could return adverts for competitors because their websites mention the given business by name, offering to beat that business’s prices.
A dedicated search engine optimisation consultant will be doing more than just writing documents. The consultant will review the content on the website so that any associated keywords are easily recognised by the search engines. He can spot places where page names and titles can be improved to aid prominence on results pages. These are the mechanical adjustments that he can recommend for a company’s website that help to improve its natural search engine positioning and its prominence on the results page. These are activities that all help a new client to spot the company’s pages. The acquisition of backlinks to the website is also essential to increasing the reputation of the website which is a major factor in building the organic positioning of a website’s pages. Much of the backlink accumulation is achieved by references from the article banks that have received the documents.
Some optimisation consultants will use unethical methods but most specialists do not. A good consultant will know that bad practices will spoil the reputation of the company website that he is promoting and his own, so unethical methods including generating spam will be avoided. search engine optimisation should not be denigrated as the source of all bad habits. Most internet users are knowledgeable enough to be cautious of the results a search can produce.
When optimizing you need to see the overall picture. There is more to optimization than heading tags, code updates and attributes, content and keywords, links and all the rest. There is one often overlooked part of this puzzle that is plainly … the emphasis.
Beyond the H1 tag, where I’m sure you are using your important keywords within the headings there is the actual content of the pages. Here is where we want to take this emphasis to task and make some of our text emphasized.
So, just how do we really emphasize words within the optimization of a site? Well, the two most obvious are using boldface or italics to show importance to the words. Placing them in quotes is also used sometimes. I have not been able to verify that this helps for optimization though. All capitals is used as well, and again, I can see no evidence that this helps in SEO.
This isn’t rocket science and it certainly isn’t a technically difficult part of optimization to get right. Yet for whatever reasons it does not get done, often, and I believe sites are missing out on a very important and useful part of the optimization process.
Using bold and italicizing are the two most important methods of doing this with your main body content. I have been unable to prove that any other method works. For the record though there is quoting, underlining, capitalizing that can be used as well, I just have no proof they work.
Across the Internet there are many sites that just don’t have emphasis in place. I believe there are quite a few simple little pieces of the optimization puzzle, like emphasis, that just get overlooked, or perhaps are unknown to the SEO workers. I believe emphasis is a valid part of SEO and I have seen it pay off in positive results on the engines. Is your site emphasized?
Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service and offers Ethical SEO Training as an affordable introduction to SEO (enough to optimize any website), as well as an Advanced SEO Training Course.
