Subject: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
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EmpowerYou
Helping entrepreneurs and not-for-profits exploit the Internet!
June 20, 2006 - Issue # 8
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Dear Ron,
Ron Foreman

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. Webmasters and content providers began optimising sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web.

Archie
One of the earliest search engines was developed at McGill University and was called Archie. Read more.

Initially, all a webmaster did was submit a site to the various search engines which would run spiders, programs to "crawl" the site, storing the collected data. The simple search scanned the entire webpage for related search words; thus a page with many different words matched more searches, and a webpage containing a dictionary-type listing would match almost all searches.

The search engines then sorted the information by topic, and served the results. As the number of documents online kept growing, and more webmasters realized the value of organic search, some popular search engines began to sort their listings to display the most relevant pages first. This was the start of a friction between search engines and webmasters that continues to this day.

Larry Page & Sergey Brin of Google
Google was started by two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank , has been important to the Google algorithm from the start. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page's value. The more incoming links a page had the more "worthy" it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page. To find out who links to your site try this.

Bart Simpson at Blackboard
The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization don't appear on Usenet until 1997, a few years after the launch of the first Internet search engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results.



In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.

You need not submit your site to the search engines to be listed. A simple link from an established site will get the search engines to visit your site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days or even weeks.

Once the search engine has found your site, it will start to index the pages if they are linked with anchor tag hyperlinks. Pages which are accessible only through Flash or Javascript links may not be findable by the spider.
Black Hat White Hat
White hat methods involve following the search engines' guidelines as to what is and isn't acceptable. They advise webmasters to create content for the user not the search engines; to make that content easily accessible to their spiders; and not to try to game the system. Often webmasters make critical mistakes when designing or setting up their websites, inadvertently "poisoning" them so that they will not rank well. these mistakes include machine-unreadable menus, broken links, temporary redirects, and a poor navigation structure.
Black hat SEO methods to improve rankings are not approved by the search engines because such methods are deceptive and unrelated to providing quality content to site visitors. Search engines often penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from the search engine results pages (SERPS) altogether. Such penalties are usually applied automatically by the search engines' algorithms, because the Internet is too large to make manual policing of websites feasible.

If you need help improving your organisation's PageRank, call us; we can help you attract more visitors to your web site and more clients to your organisation!

Sincerely,


Ron Foreman
EmpowerYou

phone: 647-999-8543

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