“I keep hearing the initials SEO..what is that?”

What is “search engine optimization” (SEO) and why should I care?

Originally outlined September 4 2007 and expanded on August 16 2009 by Valerie Serendipity Anderson

If you have zero desire to attract customers via the search engines, then you don’t need to care about how the various search engines operate. However, even if you are a local pizza place hoping to capture a few new customers, ensuring your web site is read properly by the search engines is an essential fundamental of web design.

The algorithms for each search engine are different and each have their own set of rules and guidelines, however the basics still remain the same. Attaching an XML or ROR sitemap to your site makes it easier for the spiders to crawl your. Although there is debate that the use of meta-tags is on the way out, they still serve a purpose if they are not abused. Alternative text assists with the word count game involved with page rankings. Internal search engines such as the one we use on our site relies on the art of search engine optimization techniques.

The bottom line is that if a search engine spider cannot explore your web site, you will never gain the benefits involved with the Internet community relying upon search engines to find the information they are looking for.

That’s where SEO, or search engine optimization comes into play.  With recipies to swear by, the core formula to a site achieving what is called an “organic ranking” is by contributing fresh, relevant content to your site on a regular and frequent basis.  When this blog was active, my design brand of “Valerie Serendipity Anderson” was quite active in the rankings and when I stopped contributing, the search engines began relying solely on the signals it was sent from the visitor count and a few other elements.  And a recent search revealed the surfacing of what appears to be junk entries…although I cannot be certain without visiting the site.

So if you keep the quality content coming, a variety of other ingredients can be…and will be…tossed into the mix.  If you’ve heard about something going “viral,” its because end-users have sent signals through a variety of portals designed to quick-distribute the message that “Hey!  Check this out!”…sometimes through voting mechanisms, but bookmarking services play a role as well.

This is where an SEO specialist can really help a website break through the rankings…or sink your site into legal, ethical and moral blackholes never before imagined…including a variety of blacklists being maintained (your spam filter is a customizable blacklist) and the mysterious legend of a special sandbox area in one of the search engine’s structure.

A specialist should know what promotional techniques are clearly white hat (acceptable), black hat (unacceptable) and all of the gray in between.  They can save you time by submitting your web site address to a variety of search engines to at least get the spiders dancing and then its up to the specialist to design their strategy on how to attract better rankings based on keywords and even 2 years after the last update I performed for a local pizza place still holds the #1 ranking when using the keywords Midlothian, Illinois and pizza.  Some of what helps anchor that site is the use of another tool SEO specialists can help save time, which is attaching a variety of meta tags.

Search engines like including meta tag data in their hierarchies for a variety of reasons, least of which it proves (hopefully! ) that the site wasn’t just tossed up by one of the automated producers of such garbage, let alone the features that are enabled for those with disabilities.  Properly tagging images with a clear description of its content can certainly offer potential for someone without sight to at least hear a description of the item they otherwise would have been completely unaware of…its basically an equalizing technique others continue to leverage in favor of those who have limited use of such a powerful tool readily available to those who do not have to craft their way around such a day to day lifestyle filled with barriers after barriers.  In some ways, the developers are not totally up to speed with helping one and all be in compliance, but if you look for the W3C badge on a site (the World Wide Web Consortium at http://www.w3.org offers a free testing service to see if the HTML and CSS programming abides by a variety of basic standards.  If you pass their test, you are permitted to display their graphic and link to their site…but be wary of phonies as well.  If in doubt, check it out!)

So back to search engine optimization and what it is…and isn’t.  It isn’t these lofty promises of 50,000 hits in less than 2 hours if you just pay someone a couple hundred bucks.  Those offerings are logistically impossible to sustain without high-end artificial reliance and reliability through knowing just how much junk is out there and what it takes to pull their strings of keywords ahead of sites organically generated.  But if you find someone who has at least an inkling about the art, even the most basic of SEO techniques can be of enormous benefit when it comes to helping drive traffic to your site.

Some of these acts you can probably perform yourself with a little research, such as using one of the online search engine submission services (you can copy/paste those keywords into your favorite search engine).  Be careful of the automatic opt-in features of some of the providers and be aware some of these providers let their email lists loose through a variety of additional options, so spend a few minutes actually reviewing the site and what you are asked to submit in exchange for the site sending out the signal to its roster saying “Hey guys!  Come check this out!” and then the fates of the spidering algorithms becomes part of the effects of making such a call out to begin with.

So while beware of those viral circumstances that can knock all rankings out of whack, search engine optimization is all about site -promotion and the perpetual race to rank the highest…or sometimes the lowest or even settling for somewhere in the middle…in a variety of search engines.

And if you find the right SEO artist, they can really raise both the short and long term value of such a creative construct.   As for services offering search engine submission help or even pinging your blogs, I’ve sampled quite a few with no clear indicators one way or another as to which have more speed and impact on the search engines it submits to.

It still comes back to the mysterious mathematical illusion that organic materials are supposed to be able to cut through the artificial injections and that the only way to keep artificial additions out of at least the top 10 of the keywords you have chosen to compete with is to keep coming forward with the new and original content and encouraging some form of additional reporting feature, such as links to a variety of bookmarking services or some other interactive feature that keeps a visitor clicking for more.

Trial and error is the only way to fine tune your SEO strategy and a specialist can help you avoid a large number of areas that host a slew of darker potentials for your site.

The value of hiring a web designer or developer can certainly reach the automobile pricing range, but if the site is being built beyond a handful of pages and especially for professional purposes, the use of a Cascading Style Sheet format as the template is mandatory if true value is to be built into the site.

A designer is obligated to build a site in good faith that should there be need for updates, the architecture of the site cannot artificially shackle the client to the designer. A CSS format allows for both the designer and the client to leave wide open the ability to quickly swap in and out a high percentage of layout features in a global manner…or at least amongst the pages attached to the CSS file.

So let’s say you have a 64 page web site and you’re tired of the color scheme. In fact, you want to be able to rotate the color scheme based on a variety of calendar-driven holiday’s throughout the year. Without a CSS file setting the foundation for each of those 64 pages through the editing of just one file, you would have to manually open up each individual page to perform any changes.

So the one change you want to make around Independence Day to a red, white and blue scheme is a double time whammy. The first round of time sucked away is the process of changing each individual page versus changing the same number of lines of code within one file. The added smack is if you change any data on any individual page after your changing the color scheme. Once you modify the current site, you cannot simply revert back to your old style by simply taking down the modified one and replacing it with the original design. That means additional work to copy/paste the new material into the old pages and if this step is forgotten, then unrecognized and un-quantified loss of site value occurs, such as the loss of a current listing of products in exchange for the old listing.

So when you are shopping around for a designer or a developer, make sure they know how to work with CSS formatting. Although there are exceptions to every rule…even the mandatory ones…don’t settle for a site that sticks you with such great potential for extensive labor-intensive costs for even the smallest of changes…

Like the color scheme of a site.

I can’t imagine what it would be like if I had to change each individual page within my WordPress entries the few times I have adjusted my choice of template used!! OMG! J

Remember this acronym the next time you go shopping for a web site designer and/or developer and remember that the cost of producing the first public version should not set the purchaser in a position of excessive costs if they want to re-decorate their site. This potential for minimal time investment improvements are of benefit for all parties since a designer does have the right and perhaps obligation in many cases, to charge a fee for such an effort and the end-user is treated to a visually entertaining site (hopefully! ) that appears to have had some sort of update or improvements performed to it since their last visit.