Webupon

So, what exactly is Search Engine Optimization and what can it do for you? For the boring and detailed history you can check out Wikipedia’s definition of SEO.

SEO is pretty easy if you really try to understand it and not get into its nitty gritty. The first and most important thing with SEO is content. Content is king – I’ve read this somewhere, I just can’t remember where. But that is definitely true. Write good content, something that people would really want to read, add some visuals for those people who just can’t live without eye candy and would go away as soon as they see that there’s nothing there for them, make sure that every post is good to go, meaning no wrong spellings or obvious grammatical errors, and you’re done for the first phase.

As Mr. Strunk say: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
Try to follow that advise… I don’t think I do, but sometimes I do.

The next thing you need to do is to make sure that everything, from your pages to links to navigations etc etc, is ready for the crawlies. Crawlies (a.k.a robots and spiders) are finicky and you have to lure them, entice them to crawl your site. You have to make them love your site and in order to do that, you have to present an uncluttered website – no keyword stuffing, no invisible pages, no clumsy content.

Bravo! The crawlies are loving your site. But don’t stop there. You need visitors – not just visitors, but readers. They are the blood source of your website. You have to entice them just like the way you did with the crawlies, even more so. They will decide the fate of your website. Give them content, give them eye-candies, offer them advices, freebies, entice them to subscribe. Make them stay – as I’ve said before, Content is King. Try to find bloggers or website owners who are geared toward the same interests, the same goal and you will find people coming to your website without you begging them to do it. Post in forums, submit to search engines, do manual link building.

I don’t really trust those link building/SEO softwares out there, nor do I want to shell out money for them when I can just do everything manually. Thus, giving me full control of sites that are linking to me. Linking to bad sites like link farms and banned sites will generally rub off to you, its like having one single rotten tomato in a basket of fresh tomatoes. No matter how careful you are, someday, somehow, that rotten tomato will get you.

So now, you are number one in your chosen keywords or key phrases. You are basking in the glory of it all. A week later, sometimes a day later, you go online check google and what do you see? Your website at the bottom of the list. Do you cry out in agony, tear your hair apart in frustration and don a clothes sack and put ash in your hair?

What is exactly happening here? Ranks are elusive beings, what with millions of websites popping out every hour or so, the keywords/phrase that you are ranking high in will become nothing but a dream as the day progresses. So, what do you do? You track your progress and update your website, that is. You don’t like your site to be a sitting duck after everything that you have done. You have to update. The more often you do, the more often crawlies will go to your site and index new content which will eventually count towards your website popularity.

Remember:

1. Content is King
2. Make everything search engine friendly. Do not hide content. Do not stuff keywords into a single post.
3. Link to “good” websites. Submit to search engines.
4. Update, update, update.
5. Do not be a sitting duck.