Getting the most out of your Website Part I

In this series we are going to talk about my favorite subject, websites. We
are going to look into how they are made, what it takes to create one, what
you should look for in an ISP, what domain names are, and we are going to talk
about Search Engines. In fact, the first thing we are going to talk about is
Search Engines, and what SEO is, and isn't.

There are new myths being born everyday. You can hear them crying in the morning
and baying in the afternoon. After a couple of decades of listening to the SEO's
(even before they were called SEO's), I'm amazed at the dedication they have
in spinning the same tune. The first thing you need to know about SEO's and
Search Engines is that most of the SEO's out there, don't know what they are
doing. They lobby information and tactics that are out of date (if they ever
really worked at all) and charge fortunes with no guarantee of success, not
a real guarantee.

So, what is Search Engine Optimization? Basically it is creating a website
that can be indexed thoroughly by search engine robots, and is attractive to
placement for particular sets of search criteria. Let's look at the first goal:
"can be indexed thoroughly..."

Back in the day (1990's - 2004) search engines used robots to look for new
websites and to "read" those websites to find out what they were about.
This was done with various degrees of success, and then Google showed up and
searching the Internet became a viable means to acquire real information. Before
that, you could get anything from a search and most of it was porn.

With Google came some real challenges to the Internet Marketing World. Most
search engines then would look at the front page in the area called the HEADer
section, where Keywords and Descriptions of the site were located. These Keywords
and Descriptions were written by the webmaster and marketing minds of the website.
These HTML code areas were there as a means of giving the search engines information
about the website, without having to design a website that the robots could
easily search. Of course this was a fool's goal, website marketing minds, being
what they are, soon learned that if you put in popular searches as your keywords,
such as Britney Spears, then you showed up on result pages for popular searches,
and the whole thing washed out.

Google, and the rebuilt engines to follow, ditched the HEADers and started
going through the website pages themselves. Thus our first criteria became a
real need; the website needed to be designed so that the search engine robots
would find all of the pages. Several schemes came into being for this tactic,
as the robots would only follow basic <A> Tag hyperlinks. Many SEO's today
will still talk about redundant hyperlink schemes, html sitemaps and many other
"have to do" requirements. They will talk about the problems with
dynamic pages, databases, and PDF files.

None of these schemes could insure a full run of every page, because what the
SEO's didn't tell you, is the search engines weren't going to run through every
page to begin with.

With as many types of programming being developed to create websites, and the
tendency for bots to get "tied up" inside a website, limits were always
in place for how many pages the site would be searched and how long the bot
would attempt to search for those pages. So if your programming was bad and
the bot kept looping through five pages, when the timer ran out, the bot left
the site (thinking it only had five pages). If your programming was perfect,
it might look at 20 or 25 pages and leave anyway.

All of that is history, what goes on today are XML sitemaps. Google came out
with these in 2005, allowing you to submit a full index for your website, no
matter what programming or menu systems you have created, to the search engine
directly. No more worries about schemes and menu plans. You have complete control
of what pages are indexed and which ones are not.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

Yahoo has a similar tactic, only they don't use XML, they just ask for a text
file listing all of the web pages on your site. http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

You will also hear several myths about what types of pages can be indexed.
For example (I heard this the other day in fact) it is touted that Flash pages
can not be indexed, which hasn't been true for several years. Google, Yahoo,
and Overture all index and read the text from Flash SWF files on websites.

What the search engines can't read is text in Graphic format, for example a
JPEG file that has your contact information on it; there's no way for the search
engines to read that information. Movie files (AVI, WAV, etc) also can not be
"read" though they can be searched and recognized, and may even bring
in traffic because they exist on the website. Google recently started their
Video search engine (http://video.google.com) where you can upload videos and
link them into your website.

The myth about dynamic pages not being able to be indexed; such as ASP, PHP,
Perl and other pragmatically created websites isn't true either. I don't know
of a dynamic website system that can be navigated with a browser, which the
search engines can not read, and with the sitemap files, these become even easier
for the search engines.

Next time we are going to talk about Link Farms, External Links, Keywords and
a bunch of other stuff you should stay away from.


Checkout Part II here