Wednesday, February 2, 2011

What is Search Engine Optimization

People refer to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), like it’s a golden set of actions that always have to be applied in order to reach a good ranking in the Search Engines. SEO is that common these days that all large websites hire their own SEO experts to optimize their websites and help them get more and more keywords in which they appear at the top in search engine results. On the other hand creating a new website without knowing anything about SEO you stand little chance of hitting any keyword what so ever instead you are more likely to sit in the 10th page of Google wondering what went wrong.

Quite often you will hear people complaining about people who perform SEO that they are cheating the results. My opinion on the matter is this: “It’s not cheating if everyone else is doing it”.

In my Hubpages and SEO Part 2 hub I’ve explained how hubpages optimize their website for faster indexing by Google amd get better results by performing “inpage” SEO, along with what you can do to take advantage of the techniques applied by Hubpages.

SEO despite what you may believe is extremely easy, yet time consuming and painstakingly annoying to set up the first time where you know nothing about it. I’ve found that the hard way when I developed my Top Rated Books website with a friend. I started out by developing a website which wanted to take the keywords “Top Rated Books”, “Top Rated Action Books”, “Top Rated Biography Books” etc yet after a week after I created the website and on the third version of the website I was ranking way down on the 9th page of Google wondering why that was. The “Inpage” SEO that I thought I’ve done was completely wrong and immediately (a few days) after I fixed that my website jumped 4 pages up.

Reading through articles all over the web I knew from the beginning that backlinks to your website where the most important “outpage” SEO part you could do. I’ve found out the hard way however that backlinks must not be made too early other Google will ignore them. This was a painstaking conclusion since a few days after I developed my website I’ve spent 2 days learning one of the most powerful SEO software SEnuke and applying those techniques to my website although it wasn’t indexed by Google and the “inpage” SEO was wrong.

Since I could not afford this software and was only running a trial version, when I’ve fixed the “inpage” SEO of my website I’ve started using manual techniques and using free software (some mentioned in my Hubpages and SEO part 1 hub) to my website and after a few days I saw my website jumping page after page in Google until reaching the second page and then the first page in my most desired keyword “Top Rated Books”. Now with my website safely ranking at the 5th position in Google I am still performing other techniques trying to get my website to the desired first 3 positions which might make all the difference for that website.

The point of my story is that the point of SEO is to separate the professionals from the amateurs. An amateur like myself is going to spent a month for their first website (especially if it’s a competitive keyword like mine) and only after they fix and tweak their website along the way they can reach the top. You may think it’s not fair when you create your first website and have to learn these things to reach the top, but once you reach the top for one website the others are easy to follow.

If you are only looking into applying the techniques to boost your hubs then you are in luck as you need to do only the “outpage” SEO since the “inpage” SEO is already done so well by hubpages that you can reach easily the first pages of Google in most keywords without doing anything.

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