[myNetWords.com] : SEO

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SEO

Updated : Friday 16 December 2011

SEO is one of those terms you see a lot on the web and, sooner or later, someone you know will mention it, especially in the work context. It’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as "positioning" or natural referencing, and it means all the free techniques a blog or website can use to be among the first results that come up on a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc). SEO works like a sort of shop window. You have to display your products in the window to attract the passing trade and induce the customers to come in, if you want to drive up numbers of visitors. It’s the same for a website: you can present the site using keywords that will attract the attention of internet surfers and search engines. For example, the words featuring in the URL address of the website, or in the description (signalled by a meta tag). These are known as "internal" techniques, but there are other, external ones in SEO: for instance, you can post comments on forums or popular blogs, and add a link to your website in the hope that people visiting that forum will be attracted to your site. You can also publish messages on Facebook, twitter, Linkedin or other social networks, to get your website better known.

SEO is a practice permitted by the search engines. Just as a shop owner has the right to bring in customers by placing attractions at the entrance to the shop and finding a talented window dresser, the owner of a website has the right to communicate the existence of that site on the web, and that means presenting it using words that enhance its visibility.

SEO is not to be confused with its cousin, Search Engine Advertising or SEA, which is paid website referencing (by buying keywords on Google Adwords, buying paid links, and so on). That said, things are not as clear in reality. Is SEO free? It’s by no means certain: it’s free only to geeks, who know enough about the referencing methods used by search engines to be able to optimise the traffic on their website. Even if they are competent, this takes up a lot of their time. And as we all know, time, for many of us, is money. If you don’t understand the first thing about these referencing techniques, you will need to call in a specialist agency, and that certainly isn’t free. Is SEO legal? In practice, some people use techniques the search engines condemn outright, because they pollute the web. That includes people who post comments on a forum that have nothing to do with the topic being discussed, with the aim of slipping in a link to their own website. Another technique is to set up fake blogs publishing fake posts mentioning the website they want to boost. Practices of this kind are what is known as "black hat", in other words not recommended by the search engines for optimisation, by contrast with "white hat" practices, which are allowed. But there are no clear boundaries between black hat and white hat, and most of what the webmasters do is grey hat, in other words they permit some of the breaches of the rules laid down by the search engines, as can be seen from sites like http://www.seoconsult.com. So, when you post a comment agreeing with something said on a forum, but in a meaningless way (such as by paraphrasing another comment), you are operating in that grey area. Here, again, it’s all about ethics. If you think it’s OK to mess up your neighbour’s shop window to attract more clients into your own boutique, you are potentially a "black hat" operator, by definition. Be careful, though, as the search engines feel free to sanction anyone straying too far from the straight and narrow, and if your website suddenly gains increased visibility for reasons apparently unconnected with its published content, you might be downgraded by Google, in other words, horror of horrors, relegated to page 2.