So What is SEO?
03. Sep, 2009 
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OK, so there is plenty of information out there telling you what SEO is, how to do it etc etc – so I apologise if this isn’t “new” to you.
The aim here is not to tell you how to suck eggs, but to give you guys that are starting out a good footing for understanding the concept of Search Engine Optimisation and realise it’s not witch craft after all!
You’ll notice I spell it as Optimisation rather than Optimization – as of course I’m a UK guy (born and bred British) – that alone will effect how and where I rank for certain terms. This will become clearer later on in future posts.
Right, before I fly off on a tangent, lets get back to the whole point of this post shall we?
Good – let’s go…
Search Engine Optimisation/Optimization started to become necessary when the almighty Google started to really take a hold of the internet. Sure, SEO had been around longer but back then you could get away with pretty much any “tactic” and you could rank for anything. I remember doing many a search for totally innocent subjects and it was not uncommon to get presented with plenty of adult results. Doing that to a teenager was unfair, as it just distracted me from what I was meant to be doing.
In a real boiled down description – SEO is about optimising your site so that the search engines are able to view your site, work out what it is about, and judge how important it is and whether or not it should rank for certain terms.
Remember – if you already know this stuff, this post isn’t for you. Feel free to check out the rest of the blog 
There are a million and one ways to get your site to rank in the search engines, and that will be covered over the course of time but for now, I will break SEO down into the two main categories:
On Page Optimisation:
This is pretty much what it says on the tin. This is all about making sure your site is very much enjoyable to the little spiders/bots that the search engines send out to crawl and index websites. Provide them with the stuff they like and you’re starting to get going with on page optimisation.
Site Structure and Content
It’s primarily about logic. You need to structure your site in a way that the search engines can understand. So that fully funky – smack you in the face – full Flash animated site you just spent a cool penny on – will not be understood by the search engines. Sorry. (Yes Flash sites can rank and there are methods but that’s another day).
So, saying you have a nice structure, you need to basically “tell” the search engines what your content is about. Think of a document you would write. The name of the file allows you to find it amongst the others. This could be likened to the Title Tag – the bit the shows on your browser window.
Rubbish such as “Welcome”, “Home”, or worse still “Untitled” won’t do. Not only do you look like a cowboy, but that goes nowhere to helping the search engines.
Think about what your page is about and structure your title that way. I will cover example titles in the future.
OK, so you have a better title now – great stuff. How about the content? Well when you write any document you normally have a heading/title of what it is about. Let me introduce…the H1 tag. Stands for Heading 1 or “most important” heading. This is a great opportunity to re-inforce what your page is about.
There are plenty of other on page factors that I will cover, but remember this is just to kick in your understanding of what SEO entails. This post alone wont cover everything. That would be a book.
Off Page Optimisation
How can you optimise somethng that’s not yours? Good question – well presented. To be honest the term off page optimisation is a real umbrella term for what you need to do.
Link Building
It really mainly comprises of getting links to your pages in order to show the search engines that your content is worthy and people like it so much they just have to link to it.
A lot of your efforts will be grabbing links anywhere and everywhere – although the more doesnt always mean the better. I would take one link off of the BBC homepage any time over 100 links from directories. So quality does matter.
Link building once again is a whole other selection of posts (hey I have to have something to write about 
)
There are other off page techniques, but thats more about getting traffic rather than rankings. Not only that, but this is where the whole Social Media side of things comes into play. Guess what – More on that another day.
In Closing
So, I hope this has gone some way into allowing you to understand a bit more about SEO. Yes, it’s not a comprehensive description about the whole in’s and out’s and it was never intended to be. The fact is, this is such a massive subject, I just couldnt make you sit here and make your eyes bleed (if they arent already).
Fear not – this stuff will be covered, I just want to get going in a logical order, and seeing as this is only the second post, I didn’t wanna scare you off.
What I do wanna request of you though, is to let me know in the comments what more you would like to learn so I can shape future posts. This isnt a blog for me to just talk to myself, I want your involvement!
So until next time – get involved!
John
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John Hutson
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