A Special Report - Spring 2007
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO), a subset of search engine marketing, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks," the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As a marketing strategy, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for in order to increase a site's relevancy. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, and making sure that the content is easily indexed by search engines and also appeals to human visitors.
The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO depends upon the source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" describes designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.
Interview with Matt Cutts on Search and SEO in China
from: http://www.chinamyhosting.com/seoblog/2007/04/10/interview-matt-cutts-en/
The fact is that SEO within Google's quality guidelines is okay. That includes things like making sure that your site is crawlable, thinking of words that users would use when searching and including them naturally within the content of the site, and doing things like making sure that page titles and urls are descriptive.
There was a time when Web documents were constructed primarily with the user in mind: the person reading the content came first. And then we decided we had to get fancy, start adding stuff to the presentation to make Web documents look more like printed documents.
We added pictures, tables, embedded objects, frames, and other whizbang things. But to add this stuff we had to resort to special instructions intended more for the browsers than for the people.
To simplify the task of talking to browsers we added a styling language (CSS1). It wasn't capable of much but we added layout features in the next generation (CSS2).
We even began telling browsers to stop using their own gizmos and use our own (Java, Javascript). We found ourselves having to tell browsers to stop misbehaving (MS Smarttags). We even had to prevent browsers from accessing our pages as if they belonged to other sites (frame-busting Javascript).
And we found that we could also talk to our servers from within documents, asking them to include content from other files that browsers cannot reach; asking them to serve new files after people take specific actions; etc.
Somewhere along the way we also began talking to search engines, asking them to follow, index, archive, not follow, not index, not archive stuff. And now we can tell them not to use directory descriptions in their search results pages, not to follow links on a link-by-link basis, and even to ignore certain sections of our pages that our visitors still see.
The end-users are almost completely forgotten in the cacaphony of commands being issued to servers, browsers, and search engines. Web document standards have failed miserably to separate the engine from the interface. Quite the opposite effect has happened: the Web document, which was originally just the interface, is now the engine driving all the parts.
Search engine optimization therefore has to take everything into consideration: users, servers, browsers, and search engines. Is it any wonder that SEOs stumble around the Webscape blindly poking holes into their own strategies?
We now have to remind ourselves to write copy for users, not search engines.
We use our servers to create virtual Web sites, grabbing content from hidden files and SQL databases, formatting pages on the fly.
We have to tell browsers and search engines alike to substitute URLs, to stay out of directories, or to go away completely.
And we have to tell the search engines to crawl our pages.
It was never enough for a Webmaster to just let the technology do what it was supposed to do. We had to take control wherever possible, and each time we took control over the experience the other side fought back.
Users left our cheesy sites in droves, forcing us to improve our design and content.
Servers buckled under the demand, forcing us to implement new technologies and buy more powerful hardware.
Browsers choked when rendering our convoluted pages, forcing us to advise users to surf with our favorite browsers, or to create two or more sets of content pages for those other browsers.
And search engines looked for creative ways to keep our cheesy pages out of their indexes, or to suppress our lazy content because there was something else out there which was less convoluted, more useful.
The lesson history wants to teach us is that challenge increases with complexity. That is, the more we try to do with our pages, the more difficult it becomes to do anything well, much less achieve the results we want.
Most people will read a page that has nothing more than a few navigational links, a header, and several paragraphs of text. Nonetheless, we insist on inundating them with autoloading videos, interactive gizmos that take control of the browser away from them, and hard-to-read fonts.
Most Web content can be presented in a straight list format, top-down. But now we struggle to design cascading style sheets that can take the linear content and make it appear to be spread across a page as if it were laid out on a paste-up board - and we'll gyrate through any amount of bloated CSS code in order to avoid using HTML tables ( which were originally used for page layout because we didn't have any other way to do it).
It takes less effort to create static HTML pages than it does to write a system that generates them dynamically. But we invest more and more time and resources each year into developing ever larger, more complex dynamic content generation applications.
And search engines don't need anything more than the content you put on a page to understand what it is relevant to, but we devote an increasingly lop-sided amount of time and effort to building "relevant" backlinks as well as to embedding backlinks that won't pass useful anchor text.
If you conduct a poll asking every SEO you meet what two factors are the most important for controlling search engine rankings, how many do you think will choose page titles and links? How many do you think will choose page titles and something else?
A well-rounded SEO has to understand how .htaccess files work, what server side includes are, the difference between sub-domains and top-level domains, robots.txt, which meta tags are used for which purposes, and how cascading style sheets both simplify and complicate the page layout and design process.
That same SEO needs to be aware of what on-page emphasis can do for asserting relevance, and also has to know what to look for to discover if a linking partner is cheating in an exchange.
Our competent SEO needs to have enough common sense to know that if crawlers cannot fetch pages during server down time those pages may not be indexed. Our SEO also has to understand that duplicate content may make it difficult for a search engine to decide which page to show, and that inconsistent URL references in links may cause search engines to see duplicate content that doesn't really exist.
A well-trained SEO has to think about how a page will look in Ask, Google, Live, Yahoo!, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Lynx. The same SEO knows copy needs to be compelling as well as informative. It has to be easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to follow.
There are a thousand little things you need to know and understand. But the most important thing you need to know, the most important factor for controlling search engine results, is that your Web pages must be multi-lingual, fluent in all their languages, and as simple as possible.
You should try designing a Web site that uses nothing but a handful of HTML elements, maybe only H1, OL/LI, and CENTER (allowing for links between pages). You might be surprised by what you'll learn from returning to the basics. Your pages will speak to you in a very clear, elegant way.
When you learn to listen to the rhythm of the Web documents you create you'll be better able to diagnose their problems. At all levels of design and optimization you should seek to achieve symmetrical structure. Anything that breaks the symmetry disrupts the rhythm.
And when the rhythm is broken, your page will speak to you. You just need to listen, hear, and understand what it says. That only happens at the highest level of search engine optimization. That should be your goal.
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.
* Design, content, and technical guidelines
* Quality guidelines
When your site is ready:
* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Design and content guidelines
* Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
* Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
* Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
* Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
* Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
* Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
* Check for broken links and correct HTML.
* If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
* Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Technical guidelines
* Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
* Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
* Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
* Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.
* If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
* Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.
Quality guidelines
These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.
If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www. google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.
Quality guidelines - basic principles
* Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
* Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
* Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Quality guidelines - specific guidelines
* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don't send automated queries to Google.
* Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
* Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
* Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
If a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and request reinclusion.
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