What is SEO?

Few years a go, my client ask about SEO and what’s SEO matter to his website. I am bit surprised when he ask me that, it’s a jargon in Internet marketing and he know it. SEO stand for Search Engine Optimization. We do some organic optimization to our site involving internal and external cause to make it visible on search engine. There’s bunch of SEO article out there but this issue is interesting to discuss.

This site was extremely optimized and slump in several year because of inactivity. I am bit understand how SEO works before Google Panda applied and make the crowd screams. What the heck is google Panda? is Google has panda on its engine? Not really, it’s new search algorithm introduced by Google by February 2011. It makes low quality content pushed down from the SERP. Hold on, man. What is SERP?. Well, I guess we need be more detail about that awesome jargon, right?

Before we get lost, We may agree that search engine dominated by Google and this post will narrowing the search engine provider to Google. Now, what is SERP? SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page. In general talks, it can be express like this “I want my site is visible on the first page”. So, when a user typing their keyword on search box, Google will response with search result, right? and it will come with pages. When your web site are visible in the first page then you got SERP #1 which is awesome and you will likely get clicked by visitor. A myth tell me that visitor will voluntary clicking result until SERP #10 and they will bounce out and refining their keywords.

We should understand that there’s two “ways” to make our site visible to the mass based on keyword they put in the mighty search box on any search engine. In Google there’s two ways, as long as I know, there are Paid Search and Organic Search.

Paid Search vs Organic Search on Google SERP

You can use Adwords to add your site on Paid Search, as long as you have plan to market by advertising your website, you can go with it. Organic search are the opposite, your site visibility are based on organic reason and its free listing. SEO takes place on organic search, because it’s more robust than Paid Search. Your site can take place on SERP in certain amount of time, well, quite a long time.

There’s two kind of SEO, White Hat and Black Hat. Black Hat using techniques that violate Search Engine best practice and may lead your website vanish from SERP. Hidden text is one of black hat techniques. There’s a lot of black hat techniques, for education purpose, you can read about black hat seo. Again, don’t ever try to do this to your awesome site.

White Hat SEO techniques has same complexity like black hat but you’re assure to get long-standing result on SERP. What you can do on White Hat? here’s you can do:

Internal Optimization

1. Quality Content and Good Title
2. Treat your content as your write in word processor.
3. Add description on your meta tags
4. Put good keyword on your content
5. Avoid Duplicate Content and same page title
6. Clear navigation
7. Friendly URL preferable than hazardous URL such as http://www.mysite.com/index.php?p=article&c=seo-tip&id=1&year=2012
8. Submit your site map to Search Engine
9. Check your grammar, Google Panda sees this aspect.

External Optimization

1. Link building such as post your URL or other related content to social media service like Twitter, YouTube
2. Actively engage with related community and introduce your website organically.
3. Post sincere and truthful comment on websites but don’t spam.
4. Submit your website to famous search engine.

External optimization are more human than internal optimization. Internal Optimization needs geek or SEO Consultant to help you  or you may use the famous website application such as WordPress with additional plugins which very easy to install. Remember, WordPress is not suitable for every website and not the one and only solution.