Artryst.com: Design by Gregory Tarnoff

Search Engine Optimization

Do not fall for anyone approaching you to optimize your site for search engines. This is my warning to you. any well built, standards based site with quality content will have all the necessary elements to drive traffic to your site without the optimization they speak of.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the snake oil of the 21st century. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the web offer SEO services. Typically they give you an ambiguous proposal, that states they will optimize your site, submit it to the search engines X times a month for the duration of the contract, they will submit it to Y number of search engines, and they will get you backlinks from Z sites . Then you pay them $400 per month for a 12 month period to do all this work, and you might find your site at the top for a couple weeks, but then it magically disappears. This is because their optimization focuses on loading the pages with (sometimes random) keywords, but not in a fashion that works for the visitor. Typically they are just a long line of words on the bottom of the home page that the SEO firm found to be the most heavily searched. Many times they don’t have any relevance to site at hand. Eventually the search engines will recognize this and remove you from the listing for playing games with the system.

Next they offer to submit your site a certain number of times to a certain number of search engines. There is no need to submit your site more than once to each of the following engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, and DMOZ.org (not really a search engine, but important). Once found your site will continue to be searched on regular rotation as long as you don’t violate their policies. If you don’t see your site after six weeks (test this by typing site:www.YOURDOMAIN.com into Google), then you can submit again because it would appear they did not find you. Once you are in, you don’t need to worry, just keep building quality content. If you are listed in DMOZ.org (the Open Directory Project) then you are guaranteed to be found by Google, but it can take 6 months to show up there and it is manually verified by a group of volunteers. They can choose not include you if you play games with them. Further, Google or Yahoo! are contracted by hundreds of search engines to actually power their search. So if I go to Altavista and search, I am actually seeing the results I would get from Yahoo!

However, to be found first raises another question. Just how do we do it? The fastest way to get to the top of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines is by being relevant to the topic at hand. The more relevant you are, the more people will want to use you as a source, thus linking into you. If they have been found to be respectable, the link in will be given more weight than just a random link. The more incoming links you have the faster you get found.

This doesn’t mean you should go out to every forum you can think of and post a link in one hundred different threads with your domain name as part of your signature. This is exactly what the SEO firms do. The search engines are wise to this and recognize it as spam, so they discount it. In reality if you factor in the work you had to do to get it there in the forum by the work you put forth for proper content, you will have penalized yourself greatly.