back in the day if you wanted to get noticed it meant renting a billboard
taking out an ad in a newspaper or failing that just standing on a soap box
in the park and pontificating but now
with large search engines being the go-to fonts of information for most of
us to make themselves heard people companies and other organizations have
been seeking ways to fight and Claw to
the top of search results you using a
process called search engine optimization or SEO but what is that
well you see giant search engines like Google use algorithms to try to push
relevant results to the top of the page so that when a user types in computer
mouse they'll get links to buy a new input device rather than pictures of
Stuart Little trying to use a PC now how
exactly these algorithms work are usually closely guarded Trade Secrets
but there's enough public knowledge for web Masters to attempt to tune their
pages to boost their position in the
search results in fact Google even puts
out a search engine optimization starter guide to help website owners improve
their chances of earning the coveted top
result so then for starters it's a good idea to optimize your pages metadata
metadata is all the stuff other than the
actual content people will see in their browser window and accurate metadata
things like descriptive page titles or embedding a short explanation of what's
on the page into your HTML which you can often end up seeing underneath a Google
result can help push your site up to the top a more recent development is making
URLs themselves more informative you've
probably seen this on news sites which have started to use file names that
indicate what the article is about like tasteless YouTuber wears socks and
sandals. HTML which is a lot more helpful to a search engine than just
assigning some random number another Pro
tip is to Nest your pages in some sort of sensible directory structure
organized by things like topics and dates but what about the page itself
well since most modern search engines use how often a page is linked to as a
key metric of its importance providing descriptive text links in the body of a
web page to other pages on your site can
be very helpful and search engines are
also aware of things like topic headers and ALT text for images to help
categorize the site the key as with any
metadata is to keep these as short but
also as informative and descriptive as
possible to make it easier for a c search engine to determine that your
site is relevant to a particular topic
of course though everything we've outlined so far is a legitimate SEO
strategy there are plenty of other tricks that might be employed by
unscrupulous site owners these collectively are known as black hat SEO
or spam dexing and their goal is to try
to make the page seem more relevant to a
topic than it actually is is and these tricks can take the form of anything
from hiding keywords in invisible text
that a user would have to highlight to see to buying linkbacks or even traffic
from other sites to using irrelevant keywords that might just be trending at
the moment or even just overusing the
relevant ones this kind of behavior has
resulted in a bit of a digital arms race between search engine developers who are
trying to weed out these Pages for their users and spammers or site owners who
are desperate for clicks and aren't above using Shady tactics so who will
ultimately win well let me put it this way as search giants like Google deploy
more sophisticated methods to separate the signal from the noise my advice is
if you want your website to be around for a long time stick to the honest
tried and true tactics even if your webs
s it does feature material of ill
repute speaking of SEO tricks if that's
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watching guys like dislike leave a comment subscribe and uh ah damn it I'm
sure I'm missing something but you know the drill anyway