SEO

On Monday we had a guest speaker come in to talk about his business, SEO by the Sea, which is a search engine optimization company. We covered some major strategies in SEO in class on Friday. These strategies include relevant keyword identification, matching pages to keywords, embedding keyword into the body of the page, and having appropriate ingoing and outgoing links. The whole point of SEO is to have your page rank higher on a Google, yahoo, or MSN search than others. Higher ranking means more views, clicks, and for businesses, more revenues.

For SEO by the Sea the process to SEO for a client begins with a conversation about what the client would like to achieve with their site. When a goal is established the focus is then put on identifying the company's major competitors, drafting a list of target keywords, and composing a basic SWOT analysis. One of the most strategic moves a site can make is to categorize the different element the site offers. The categories begin very broad, like clothing, as the speaker suggested, getting more and more specific. So the categories may descend from clothing to men's apparel, to dress shoes, to brown leather dress shoes. At each level the key words get more specific, indicating a more refined search. While this stratification is good for new sites, it may be more difficult for older, more established sites with an ingrained structure. This can be surmounted by adding content and pages to the main page of the site.

As we learned in class, the main strategy of SEO is to put the key words in strategic locations; in the title, in the context, and in the anchor text of links to and from other sites. All of these measures improve the sites probability of being picked up when certain key words are searched. It adds Google Juice to the page. The overriding feature of SEO is to be persuasive. A site wants as many people to visit it as possible and it must persuade, overtly or covertly, people to click on its link. This means matching it with the right key words so when the searcher sees the page it is the exact one they want. On top of this the page must be optimized so that if there are others like it, serving the same needs, the site is selected over others.

A final element to discuss is the issue of SEO ethics. By optimizing a site one is essentially manipulating the site to be more desirable to the search algorithm. As the speaker put it to the class; "When we type in the key word Nike, should Nike.com be the first site to come up or should it be a critique of Nike?"