SEO and Me Tuesday, July 1, 2008

SEO is Search Engine Optimization and it means optimizing the web sites for its pages to appear on SERPs(Search Engine Result Pages). I would call this rocket science more or less because SEO involves a large set of parameters that determine the page rank. I'm not speaking about the SEO factors here. It runs to a huge list having 100+ parameters.I'm speaking about the unknown side of my business.

You cannot produce instant results

Unless you are running a site that updates news, 3-5 times a day. You cannot see instant results with SEO. In short a web page published yesterday will not show up on the search results today.In terms of long term profit business one who does SEO cannot show results to their customer in a short time. Its up to the people who run the business to convince them about their efforts to their clients.There are some web sites out there who promise "high Google rank"
in two weeks. These are people who either lie or someone who owns a 7+ page rank. The second possibility might not be true because everyone who does SEO is after instant benefits and they undoubtedly commit some mistakes while they don't notice them.Finally its the major corporates whose official web sites fall under the 7+ category.You can be pretty sure that the content you just added to your web site will show up on search engines only when its a news
agency site or your site needs to be 2 or 3 years old with no bad remarks from Google. In fact they never tell you the remarks, they just add it to their knowledge base.

Google is Against us.

Meet Mr.Matt Cutts the head of Google web spam team.He and his team is ruthlessly working against web spam. When Google's web master guidelines are breached to a large extent. Its what they call Web Spam. There are a "LOT" of people around the world working on SEO. These guys are professionals just like me. But there is not CMMi level certification awarded even for those who produce best results. Some companies get a CMM levels for their software and show it up for SEO. Thats a bad thing. There is not standard method of doing sEO. Everyone of these SEO will have their own practices for doing it. But no matter what we do, Google always is against manipulating itself for high rank.No one of us wanted to be manipulated or even cheated and so is Google. They punish web sites if they try some methods to trick the search engine robot for getting a higher rank. They're right on their part. So what is the solution to all this work againsts. Some of the successful people in getting higher ranks( I don't mean SEO guys) are those who followed the Google web master guidelines either intentionally or just a part of building their own site.Wikipedia is one such example. To me right now SEO means following Google's guidelines. In fact following this would give a lot of benefits both for Visitors and Google.

SEO is not Super Easy Optimization

What does it mean? If you start a blog today and slap some ads on it with your "imaginary" visitors and look for income,it doesn't work.Eventually you lose the interest and stop working on it.This is not such a business. I'm working on it for more than a year and its only now I reap the benefits. Believe it or not Yahoo took six months to take one of my pages to top ten in search results. I hate yahoo for doing this. These guys are just too strict,can't blame them for it because they look at quality of the page and put you in a sandbox for long time. Its six months inside the sandbox and I'm out of it now.Google's pretty fast and I'm getting a lot of visitors from Google Search results.

We face problems same as search engines

You type in some query and Google produces a list of sites that are related to that term. Most relevant based on their algorithms.But what runs in the mind of someone who searches is not known. Might be search engines deliver results to you based on your earlier queries.This does not solve the problem.If I want to get a page for the search term "USB driver for P2P". The result pages look as if Google functions flawlessly, yes it is flawless but what goes in the mind of the person who searches is different from the algorithmic results. The person bears in mind the
driver that is used to connect two PC's using USB ports. But the results produced are for the P2P file sharing over the Internet.Any search engine fails on this account. Might be some geek at Google will solve it soon just like they solved the mistyped word with the "Did you mean" feature. This problem with the user's context meaning is also applicable to us. When someone lands on my site and gets content that is not desirable the user experience degrades. This is a small problem when considering the ratio of good vs bad results. But the problem is not solved in anyway.When you start optimizing for some keywords, the combinations that are not wanted are also produced.Take this example "Google is Good. Microsoft Sucks". If I place this on the title of my page. There is a possibility that the page appears for the search term "Google Sucks". The person who authored the page did not mean it. But still algorithmic results suck in this way also. I mean all search engines suffer the same problem as this.

Algorithms keep changing

Google does not have the algorithm same as in 1998, these guys keep revising the algorithm at all times.And this is a problem when SEO starts deviate towards the "Black Hat" kind. Search Engines eliminate black hat techniques as each time the algorithm is revised and this the learning happens cumulatively. Apart from their algorithm their Sand boxing technique changes. In spite of these changes, you try tricking the bot in a big way, you're done, they block your site depending on the penalty that you receive.


How long will SEO survive?

It will survive as long as Internet and web design survives. It is increasingly becoming the integral part of web site design itself.So there is much more opportunities experiment with search engines.With experience it makes a lot of difference to your online presence.Some time in the next 100 years some technology might replace Internet. Till then its good time for people like me.


So,What is SEO?

SEO is advertising for free. I'm not telling its free money,its free advertising. You pay some bucks to Google to get place your ads on the side of search results each time it appears on the results. Why not spend money to be on the search results for infinite number of times. Contact me if you want to apply SEO for your site.

Another SEO tactic,
I just want to know how long does it take to index this post by search engines. So I use this word nivashification which is not on any other page on the web. After this page gets indexed type in nivashification will show up this page.