Introduction
Everyone wants their website to be at the top of the search
engine pile, right? … Thankfully unless you are in an ultra-competitive area, it’s
not that difficult. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the combined
science/art of ensuring that a website has everything in place to ensure it
ranks highly, but what you learned about SEO from articles a few years ago has
changed. Search engines are now smarter, and most are very focused on filtering
out spammers who insist on dishing up trash masquerading as high value content.
Over the past 24 months or so, Google has unleashed some major changes to its
search algorithm that have dramatically changed the search landscape. Matt Cutts,
head of webspam at Google, says that to rank high now, you need to provide high
quality content, ensure your site is running optimally, and promote it well. The
major Google updates are code named “Panda” and “Penguin” - this series of
articles will give you the basics of the new SEO for 2013 so you can get a head
start on your competition and meet these new “black and white” requirements (sorry,
I couldn't resist J).
The plan
Over this series of articles I will cover the following
topics:
- SEO History, what’s changed, and why
- SEO Basics
- On page factors
- Off page factors
- Social proof and why it’s important
- Content generation – how to do it and get it right
- Measuring progress / keeping on top of the pile….
Developers
are busy people, so I don’t intend to go into huge detail – I’ll keep that for
the book J …
there will be just enough to give you a good understanding, and get started. As
seasoned developers and web searchers, I expect you will easily be able to dig
out the detail for anything you need after that. I refer in this article mainly
to Google, however, get it right for them and you will undoubtedly benefit with
all engines.
Let's begin...
In the
beginning there was yahoo! (and! others!), and searching the web was basically
crawling through a big big big directory, a yellow pages of the Internet if you
like. In the distant and cobwebby recesses of my mind I don’t recall them doing
a huge amount at the time except categorise websites, by category, and
sub-category, and sub-sub-sub-sub-sub category (ad infinitum). Yahoo and others
got some assistance from the Inktomi engine which ranked pages based on link
popularity. The first time I saw Google I was amazed. Rather than getting back somewhat
related search results to the query I entered, Google gave me really good
quality links. It was almost like it could read my mind. The mind reading was courtesy
of the famous “Page rank” algorithm that was developed by the lads (Serg and
Lars to their mates) at Stanford University in 1996. Page rank is essentially a
method for determining the popularity and relevance of a webpage. At its
simplest, the page with the most relevant links related to a particular topic floats
to the top of the pile.
Unfortunately
it didn't take long for spammers to figure out how things worked, and critically,
how to game the system. The most basic way of doing this was to stuff a page
with words related to the topic you were targeting, and get as many other sites
as possible to link back to the page. Black hat SEO companies had a field day using
link farms and other nefarious strategies to bring their chosen pages to the
top of the search pile ahead of more legitimate content.
When Panda
and Penguin came along anyone who had used the recommended old style strategies
were doomed. Websites that had previously enjoyed number one rankings seemed to
drop off the face of the Google driven Internet completely. Google was fighting
back with a vengeance.
In 2013,
keyword stuffing is out, non-relevant links are gone, poor quality content is
penalised and a slow website will drag you down in the rankings. Google’s
mission is to clear its search results of spammers and ensure that only top quality,
relevant, and authoritative content get shown to users. Panda and Penguin are
clearing the way for this to happen.
In the next
article we'll cover the NEW SEO basics, with both on and off-site factors being
discussed.
History
nb: image from seo top picks.com
