Understanding Optimization

Although all our sites are build around Search Engine Optimization (SEO) few clients are actually aware of what this actually means.

I will try to explain some of the more arcane terminology used in the SEO world.

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There are two widely accepted types of optimization,

White Hat
This is the the classic optimization, widely used and acceptable to all search engines. White Hat optimization in theory will never get you penalized or banned, and covers these topics

Meta Tags – accurate Description and Title tags
Keyworded Content – main content must contains the keywords and variants .
Site Layout (Theme)- keeping the site within a particular theme
Links – Sensible linking to and from related sites, unsolicited inbound links, organic link growth.

Black Hat
This covers the lesser known highly aggressive approach, almost all competitive categories require some degree of black hat optimization.

Cloaking – displaying one page to a search engine and another to a human visitor
Shadow Domains – domain names that replicate the main site (or a segment) for the purpose of spamming a particular search engine.
Doorway Pages – pages that designed purely for search engines.
KeyWord Spamming – repeating phrases and keywords many times on a page
Page Hijacking - Stealing someone else’s rankings with a redirect.
CSS Tricks – Hiding links, resizing elements, blocking PR transfer
Aggressive Linking – buying text links, utilizing links farms, guest books, solicited unrelated 2-way and 3-way links.

Generally most competitive sites use varying degrees of black hat optimization, understanding what type of optimization maximizes chances to rank well with the minimum risk of penalties is down to the skill of the optimizer.

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PageRank (PR)
A method of working out the probability of landing on a particular page by randomly surfing links, used mainly by google although all other search engines have a similar system. Essentially the more links you have from sites with high Pagerank, the higher your Pagerank will be. Pagerank was used to boost on-page optimization factors, on its own its pretty useless.

Consider if you will the fastest Formula 1 car, without a good driver it never achieves it full potential. Pagerank is like that car

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
As the name suggests its paying for adverts in search engines and affiliate sites, you only pay when someone clicks on the advert. The current system is prone to abuse but can be very effective for some sites.

Bots / Crawlers / Spiders
Automated programs that crawl and index your site.

Main Algorithm / Algo
This is the primary system used to determine what pages should rank where, this is usually made up of a series of filters and lesser algorithms.

Filters
This is where optimization really begins…
Usually used to detect spam, or spammy behaviour in websites, Filters are constantly being changed by search engines in response to growing optimized spam, Optimizers respond by tweaking their sites to match the Filters. This ongoing symbiosis between search engines and optimizers will always continue as long as sites are ranked in an automated manner.

Currently all optimizers make educated guesses on the probability of a filter being in place and the cut-off point of that filter. If you can just touch the upper limit before the filter kicks in you can rank highly, push too hard and you will be dropped to the bottom of the pile. Being able to take advantage of the various filters in place is key to good optimization, everything else is pretty much general knowledge, and can easily be read up on in a few days.

Asif.
The Optimizer.

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