Latest news buzz in webdesign world “Is Search Engine Optimization Dead?”.
Short answer:
NO.
Long Answer:
Still no but a few things have changed and a few things have been stopped. You now get penalized for using tactics like Google Sniper. Google bombing, keyword plugging, etc etc. Truth is, that never was Search engine optimization. that was ghetto style pyramid scheme junk.
The team at Google has removed most scams you can pull on Google and just left the actual optimization part in there.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Well let’s look at a book store as an example. Imagine if you have a bunch of great books. An entire book store full of books. Now picture yourself opening this new book store. you came up with this cool idea of hiding all of the book in the ceiling tile, and the signs you purchased were inside out, upside down, and behind the building and just say “Dave’s” on them. What is Dave’s? Why is the sign not where everyone expects it to be? Why is it backward? why is it upside down? For that one guy who rolls his car in traffic trying to read the sign in his rear view mirror? It’s not great forethought. Now a person walks in.. Where the heck is everything? Why aren’t these people listed anywhere? they aren’t in a phone book, they aren’t in a news paper… What the heck is this place? When they figure out it’s a book store, where is everything? and why isn’t it in order? Everything is just chunked about in the ceiling area.
Search engine optimization is so you can fix those issues on the internet. Optimize your website for search engines. Pretty simply stated.
Google is leading the way to fixing it so scammers can’t just jump ahead of people with decent content, well organize easily navigated websites. sites with titles that match the content. Page titles that match that page’s content and a small “card catalog” type section built just for search engines so they know what the main items are that you want people to focus on when they hit hat page, the stuff that the page is about. This is called “Keywords”. Some people believe that keywords are dead. They are far from dead. The people that say that “Keywords are useless”, are people who use heavy searched words that are totally unrepresentative of their content. These people just want traffic to their page, they are of no help to society and are scammers.
Meta tags matter.
Meta tags are fairly simple to understand. These are the important ones.
Title: tells people the name of your page
Description : tells people what your page is about.
Keywords: words associated to your content that people will search for that is relative to your page.
Why would you use meta tags?
This is for search engines. Google needs to display the title of the page in the results. So title is important. Description, well all search engines put a small two or three sentence snippet in the search results, it’d be nice if the person doing the search knows what might be there before he/she clicks. Keywords, when they search for a specific item by one word, Search engines will search for sites with that word in it’s keywords and then highlight it in the search results. If it’s not in your keywords and in your actual content, then your site most likely will not show up in the results.
No you do not want to show up in every single search for every single item on the internet. You want to show up for items related to your content. You are most likely to please the reader that way, and your items will move faster.
What Google has done
Google has stopped people from plugging their meta tags with unrelated items and made Search Engine Optimization exactly what it is. Optimizing your website for better search results and they penalize anyone who is scamming the system. This could mean anything from bumping them down in importance, all the way to kicking them out of search engines.
This will help you in all search engines, and help your content be better found by people who actually want your items. If you are set to bring anyone and everyone to your website, you are less likely to bring the people who actually want your items. If you focus on your items and products, then you will receive traffic from people who are looking for your products or services.
The better your SEO is done, and the better your content is, the higher a priority you will become for your items.