SEO: There's a lot to know, use and understand

Search Engine Optimization is something I'm only familiar with in passing. And when I say that, I mean from people I've met at Newhouse, especially those in the Content Management class. Wow I wish I had room for that class now in my schedule.

The first piece of information that stood out to me was how you use your words when building and promoting websites. Whether its page titles, heading tags, images or URLs one should choose their words wisely. Gregory Markel a SEO expert, demonstrated to a crowd at a recent conference just how effective being mindful or your videos can be.

Clear, concise, to the point and some creativity go a long way to helping make your site accessible for search engines. By simplifying these things in website construction its easier for someone a search engine to analyze your page content and therefore easier for people to find.

Self-promotion was another concept that opened my eyes. Updating your website content and explaining why you're doing so not only keeps your content up to date, but is also another way for SEO to pick up your content. Also, promoting yourself offline can be just as important as what you do online. I thought the concept of putting your website or a business card made a lot of sense. People are more directed towards the internet these days and if they see a website in this format, they're more apt to check it out a few times.

Promoting your website through social networking seems like common sense to me. Every time I'm on a blog or even Facebook someone if promoting themselves. It's a concept that people have latched onto and learned to capitalize on. This article even explains how Facebook acts as a promoter through "newsfeed. " It also points out how Facebook allows you to use their services to enhance your content and the people your reach, much the same way Google Analytics and Website Optimizer do.

SEO

This article really opened my eyes and informed me about how and why search engines function the way they do. The PDF article gave a great breakdown on how to successfully optimize your website in a search engine. Clearly it is an art form. You have to find clear, simple, yet effective words that will bump your site up the search engine line.
In a blog I found while searching about SEO's, I learned through a blog post by a member of the SEO.com website blog that said, "Believe it or not, Google employs a team dedicated to searching for webspam. They invest lots of time and resources into finding and shutting down effective paid linking opportunities. This is the number one reason why you should never participate in paid links. Once Google finds you, you are done!" This is something that was discussed in the wikipedia page when I first searched for the definition of SEO. It seems that more and more, people are trying to get their way in the ranking by doing anything. They call this black hat and white hat techniques.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
http://www.seo.com/blog/

As far as for promoting my website, I would definitely take advantage of social networking since one of the top worldwide websites is Facebook and YouTube. This I learned in my advertising class where we discussed the current boom of social networking tied in to websites and promoting campaigns with banners. In this time and age, websites depend on advertising themselves in these networking sites because this is where people go to first, especially with all the features and accessible links that are now integrated to the web page. Metadata, also called social bookmarking is a way of simplifying the access to my website and will probably increase the traffic per click. I would include these two methods to make my website more accessible to those interested. Also I would take in consideration the recommendations made my the PDF article to improve my search engine optimization.