What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
922 words · ~4 min read
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back in the day if you wanted to get noticed it meant renting a billboard
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taking out an ad in a newspaper or failing that just standing on a soap box
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in the park and pontificating but now
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with large search engines being the go-to fonts of information for most of
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us to make themselves heard people companies and other organizations have
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been seeking ways to fight and Claw to
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the top of search results you using a
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process called search engine optimization or SEO but what is that
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well you see giant search engines like Google use algorithms to try to push
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relevant results to the top of the page so that when a user types in computer
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mouse they'll get links to buy a new input device rather than pictures of
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Stuart Little trying to use a PC now how
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exactly these algorithms work are usually closely guarded Trade Secrets
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but there's enough public knowledge for web Masters to attempt to tune their
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pages to boost their position in the
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search results in fact Google even puts
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out a search engine optimization starter guide to help website owners improve
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their chances of earning the coveted top
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result so then for starters it's a good idea to optimize your pages metadata
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metadata is all the stuff other than the
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actual content people will see in their browser window and accurate metadata
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things like descriptive page titles or embedding a short explanation of what's
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on the page into your HTML which you can often end up seeing underneath a Google
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result can help push your site up to the top a more recent development is making
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URLs themselves more informative you've
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probably seen this on news sites which have started to use file names that
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indicate what the article is about like tasteless YouTuber wears socks and
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sandals. HTML which is a lot more helpful to a search engine than just
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assigning some random number another Pro
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tip is to Nest your pages in some sort of sensible directory structure
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organized by things like topics and dates but what about the page itself
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well since most modern search engines use how often a page is linked to as a
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key metric of its importance providing descriptive text links in the body of a
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web page to other pages on your site can
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be very helpful and search engines are
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also aware of things like topic headers and ALT text for images to help
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categorize the site the key as with any
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metadata is to keep these as short but
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also as informative and descriptive as
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possible to make it easier for a c search engine to determine that your
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site is relevant to a particular topic
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of course though everything we've outlined so far is a legitimate SEO
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strategy there are plenty of other tricks that might be employed by
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unscrupulous site owners these collectively are known as black hat SEO
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or spam dexing and their goal is to try
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to make the page seem more relevant to a
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topic than it actually is is and these tricks can take the form of anything
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from hiding keywords in invisible text
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that a user would have to highlight to see to buying linkbacks or even traffic
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from other sites to using irrelevant keywords that might just be trending at
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the moment or even just overusing the
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relevant ones this kind of behavior has
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resulted in a bit of a digital arms race between search engine developers who are
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trying to weed out these Pages for their users and spammers or site owners who
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are desperate for clicks and aren't above using Shady tactics so who will
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ultimately win well let me put it this way as search giants like Google deploy
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more sophisticated methods to separate the signal from the noise my advice is
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if you want your website to be around for a long time stick to the honest
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tried and true tactics even if your webs
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s it does feature material of ill
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repute speaking of SEO tricks if that's
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just yet another thing that you don't want to deal with when you want to build
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your own website Squarespace actually does a lot of this stuff automatically
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watching guys like dislike leave a comment subscribe and uh ah damn it I'm
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sure I'm missing something but you know the drill anyway