A short history of Search Engine Optimisation – Part Four (Final)

Its now 2009, the early days of the WWW are long gone and largely forgotten. Less than 1 in 10 of the current online population were around back then. Search engines are starting to count the size of their index in trillions, and the best of them use increasingly complex formula and logic in producing search results lists.

Despite this, the heady days in the late 90s when SEO experts could make a few specific changes to a client website and see them rise to the top of various search engines results lists have not been forgotten by all. I regularly come across clients, business consultants, advertising agencies, and most eyebrow-raising of all, well established SEO companies, who still believe that all they need to do to optimise their website is stuff their keywords tag with 300 search terms. This, despite the fact that such practice is pretty close to a complete waste of time.

For more information see Danny Sullivan’s post at search engine land, Brent Yorzinky’s post at search engine journal, and Wikipedia’s entry for the Meta element.

So how do we increase a websites chances of getting noticed in search engine results lists today? What can we learn from our brief consideration of the history of the WWW, search engines, and SEO? The most important thing to learn is that the success of the WWW has bred competition amongst websites, which has bred competition amongst search engines. This has caused search engines to become extremely sophisticated, using complex agorithms and logic.

Why? What is the objective of a search engine? What is it that Google search and the other major players in the market fear the most? They fear irrelevancy. If a search engine keeps producing search results that do not satisfy the user, that are irrelevant to the user and the search term they are entering, the search engine itself will quickly become irrelevant.

When a user types “history of search engine optimisation” into a search engine, they want the search engine to provide links to pages that contain details concerning the history of search engine optimisation. But how do you build an automated search engine system that can detect what a page is genuinely about?

Search engines today are designed to give priority to web sites with genuine content, web pages that read naturally, rather than being stuffed with key words.

The history of the WWW, search engines, and SEO has brought us to a point where it is quicker and easy to make a good, easy to use, relevant website that gets ranked well by search engines, than it is to fool search engines into ranking a poor, content starved site near the top.

Here are the three things you should do for good SEO:

1. Get a professional web developer to build you a site with full content management, and actively fill the site with content that is relevant to your customers, clients, or interested parties.

2. Get a professional SEO consultant to make sure the right parts of the website exist, and have the right sort and amount of content in them.

3. Get a professional web consultant to hook your site up with analytics services and hand your regular easy to understand reports concerning your sites performance.

For more information contact me at www.imagineglobal.biz

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Tags: content management, seo, web development