I’m sure that all webmasters have heard of SEO, i.e., Search Engine Optimization, but do you know how to pronounce it? Is it like seal, sale, or simply S.E.O.? Who would want to do some SEO? I certainly do! As search engines continue to improve, new methods are utilized to gather website information. The internet is infested with bots (robots), spiders, crawlers, and other creepy crawlies that are invading websites. It doesn’t sound like a good thing in terms of privacy, but for business related websites, it’s essential. When a keyword is entered into a search engine by a potential customer, a list of websites are displayed and for internet businesses, they would want their site listed as the first one and that can be done by optimizing a website for search engines. Without doubt, SEO is a good way of generating traffic.

Now you ask, “How do I optimize my website?”
Good question! To optimize, you want to create the best possible habitat for those creeping things. A good habitat has:

• Clean and valid code
• A professional design (Not like my site, I set counter examples)
• Lots of bullsh*t useful related content with keywords in them
• A sitemap for the bots to find their way
• A robots.txt file to control and guide those bots
• A good domain name (Again, not like mine)
• Concise and accurate titles (One more time… Not like mine, HEY that rhymes! That’s too damn fine!)

Now that you know the basics of creating a good environment for your favourite internet bots, you need some tools to help you out. Some cool tools, that is.

• Google offers some free tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/
• iWebTool has a good list of tools, too: http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/

It takes a lot of time to learn about SEO and it took me a long while just to figure out what SEO meant. It’s internet marketing and it’s not simple. I hope this was an elementary enough explanation, but if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 10:16 pm, and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.