Search engine optimization

I found the SEO article by Google very helpful. I'm fairly versed in SEO, but the article had a few pointers that I found interesting.

First of all, I now realize why websites include the title of the article in the URL. On sites that I have worked for, a lot of times the posts were numbered (i.e. /23540). I know now that those articles are much less searchable. I'm also notorious for being in too big of a hurry to add any alt text to images. Not only is it good for web browsing, but it's better optimization for search.

I also found it interesting that you can use the "nofollow" meta-tag so that robots don't include certain items in your ranking calculation. That could be very useful if you have an odd post that isn't necessary relevant to your site.

The advice to blog about new features, etc. was good advice as well. And I am going to start doing that with the sites that I work on now.

For promotion, you are foolish to not use social networks. On Kikolani.com, a post gave some advice on what promotions can be run on Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter advice is clever. The post advises to promote something on your site with Twitter, but to add a hash tag that is popular at the time (i.e. #haiku or #oscars). That way it will show up in the trending topics and could get more exposure. It has become almost standard now to create a Facebook fan page for your business as well, so you can update all of your fans at once.

For social bookmarking sites, I think it's important to get a lot of links posted. Sites like Digg, Reddit and delicio.us are great springboards to getting content read. An article on ezinearticles.com offers 4 benefits to using these sites. Obviously the main goal is to gain exposure, but the most interesting points were that social bookmarking provides branding and gives quality backlinks. If you post a lot of links on the social bookmarking sites, then you demonstrate your expertise. Also, to match up with the search engine optimization, you get quality backlinks, which help improve your rating.

SEO is essential to increase exposure and traffic to your website. The tips given will be very beneficial as I continue to develop my website. The process will continue to evolve and it is wise to keep up with the changes.

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.