What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It basically describes the act of designing and optimizing a website with the intent of garnering better placement in a search engine (Yahoo, Google, MSN), when someone searches keywords and phrases that the site owner wants to be found for. Although Flipout Design creates websites with widely accepted SEO practices and search engine's recomendations in mind, we are not SEOs (people who do this for a living) and are not necessarily in the business of performing SEO analysis. However, we have determined that the information we have found useful ourselves, could be provided as a benefit to others looking for information on the subject. Posting articles that are useful to people is also a good way to add "link bait" to your website. If you are not sure what we mean by link bait then you are in the right place.

The so called experts

I don't claim to be the master of the universe when it comes to Search Engine Optimization by any means. Not long ago I was the complete novice on the almost vertical learning curve of optimizing for search engines and was having a difficult time finding answers to my questions about how to be found, and better yet, appreciated by the big 3 search engines out there.

So if I'm no master SEO then why write about it at all? Well, after gathering a LOT of information, making plenty of mistakes and finally experiencing some success, I felt that sharing those experiences and the information I ended up with might help guide others on the same quest.

So who are the so called experts? Well, on my path to educate myself about website promotion, I found that there are plenty of people out there willing to give advice on the subject. However, while some have pure motives, others do not and will to use your noobness to their ultimate financial advantage. Even those with good intentions, I have found their advice to be either flat out wrong, outdated or both. Part of what I intend to do in this area is point you in the right direction for getting good advice based on my own experience.

A Few Rules of Engagement

While the world of search engine optimization is a confusing one with contradictory information everywhere you look, there are a few sound rules to keep in mind that are reiterated throughout the SEO world and are even vaguely confirmed by the likes of the almighty Google:

RULE #1: Design for your customers/visitors first. When thinking about content for your website, it is easy to get lost in all the SEO tricks and tips. The truth is that sites that are useful, informative and user friendly will thrive regardless of how poorly they are written for a search engine's spider. What good is a ton of traffic anyway if your visitors are gone 5 seconds after they find your site?

That being said and with everything that follows being secondary to rule #1:

Title, Headers and Bold Text: Search engines tend to value these when looking for keywords, more heavily than other text found on a web page so as you design the flow of a document consider the terms for which you would like the page to found for and use them in the title and headings that describe the paragraphs that follow. Bold text will also help a typical web surfer who scans more than they read, find the information they are looking for.

Meta Tags: The three kinds of meta tags you should consider optimizing for are the title, keywords and description. Whether or not they will actually improve your search engine rankings is suspect due to the wide abuse it received in the early days of the net. They are still important as many search engines use this information to display your website in the search engine results. Pretend you are a potential customer scanning the various results after searching for their keywords on their favorite search engine. Which would you try first? Which would you avoid like the plague?

Descriptive URLS: Some engines like MSN award higher relevance to a page if the searched keyword(s) is found in the url. While this can be difficult to archive for dynamic websites under certain server configurations with thousands or even tens of thousands of pages, it is utterly essential for smaller static sites. It also has the additional benefit of being more readable and therefore easier to remember by your visitors.

Here is an interesting video from SEO industry expert Laura Lippay that covers the basics of designing for Search Engine Optimization that should be especially helpful for beginners.

SEO DON'Ts: Things to Avoid

Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is packing your website's pages with keywords and keyword phrases that you want to rank highly for. Bulking up the number of these terms used to mean you would rank higher for them as the search engines algorithms used to rank your pages for relevance for those key words based on, among other factors, the number of times they occurred on a page. In an effort to rid search result of all the spammy results the search engines have made great efforts to counter these efforts. Google has even publicly stated they may discount or penalize a sites ranking for such practices. Unfortunately, there are a vast number of websites who continue to do this and are ultimately pushed to the margins as the search engines algorithms become ever more sophisticated.

Hidden Text: Using hidden text on web pages is a variation of keyword stuffing except the webmaster hides the spammy text via a number of different methods such as matching the color of the text to the pages background, hiding portions of a page with CSS and probably a few others I don't even know about. The bottom line is if a spider sees something that a surfer doesn't and you get caught, you're busted, blacklisted and flat out banned from a search engine. Recent articles such as this one and this one have appeared in a number of blogs that major companies were caught doing this and paid the price.

Duplicate Content: Here on the information super-highway content is king. More specifically, unique content is what the search engines love and so will your visitors. As the web grows so does the amount of content that a search engine company must archive. You can imagine that with finite resources SE's would rather not cache/archive the same information in their databases. Additionally, search engines don't want to reward someone for copying someone else's content. Providing useful information while keeping visitors on your site sometimes requires you research a topic and prepare an article or resource based on that research but don't be tempted to plagiarize. You will end up with a zero net gain and you might make an enemy of the original author. If you don't want to prepare the information simply link to where your visitors can find it and reward the original author.