Search engines are constantly indexing content, and recording which site links to which other site, the content that appears on each page, the tags and keywords associated with certain topics, and a number of other elements. In all, there are hundreds of different signals search engines use to determine relevance – a word that’s used to indicate how relevant a given page is to a given query.

The search engine indexing process starts with the search spider. When we refer to a search engine spider or bot (short for robot), we’re talking about one or more dedicated computers that have been programmed to crawl the Web and collect all the information they can find, and store how all that information is related to various search terms.

Modern search engine spiders have two distinct tasks:

1. Crawling is the traveling from site to site, and page to page, discovering content and links.
2. Indexing is the task of building a database (or an index) of keywords and phrases, the sites and pages that are relevant to them, and the links between those sites.

The process by which a search engine spider works is illustrated in Figure 1.4 below. Within each site, the spider will follow internal links from the top-level index page down through all of the site’s other pages.

Once the search engine spider has scoured pages, various bits of information are stored in the search engine’s index. Some of those important pieces of information include:

• the content and structure of each page
• a record of all the pages that link to the page
• key HTML tags such as the page title, headings, and images

This is a very basic list of the types of data that search engines index. There are obviously some very smart ways in which they identify relationships between pieces of information and index websites, but for the purposes of this article, those pieces of information are all you need to concern yourself with.

Once this information has been collected and stored in a database, the search engine’s proprietary algorithms take over; each engine uses its own special calculations to determine how relevant your website’s content is to a particular search term. These algorithms are the difference between a search engine that any programmer could write in a week, and the dominant search engines today.

The major factors that search engines use to determine a page’s relevance for a particular search query are much the same now as they were in the days when Google first launched its PageRank technology; however, they’ve become more sophisticated and complex over time through the ongoing battle for more relevant search results.

Two key factors are:

1. The number and authority of related websites that link to the page
2. The relevance of the content on the page to the query

Again, this is a highly simplified way of looking at SEO, as there are hundreds of different factors that can determine where a page will rank for a given search term.

There is, however, one extremely important lesson to take from this discussion: external factors – that is, those outside of your control – play a major part in any SEO campaign. These external factors will often have a bigger impact on determining relevance than your content does. Building the best site in the world will do no good if there’s little attention focused on these external ranking factors. That said, having quality content with a unique perspective will influence other sites to link to you; hence, these external factors are, to a degree, within your control.

Everybody knows that feeling deep down inside when our conscience warns us that we’re about to do something that’s not quite right. You’ll get that feeling if ever you stray into the less respectable areas of SEO. The rules of good SEO aren’t complicated after all, we just learned what ethical SEO involves, and it isn’t rocket science!

The techniques we’ll discuss here should be avoided if you’re focused on building rankings that will stand the test of time. Many of these tactics will incur penalties from search en- gines if they’re discovered, and some might lead to the site being removed from the search listings altogether. Black hat tactics, as these are commonly called, should be seen as the mark of desperation: those that employ them do so because they lack the skill and dedication to build a strong SEO campaign.

Buying Links

Search engines dislike being tricked into thinking that a website is more relevant than it actually is. That’s why buying paid links from other websites is an issue: it can have an undue influence on the makeup of a search results page.

Imagine what would happen if search engines openly allowed paid links without any punishment. The company with the deepest pockets would always be ranked first! Fortunately for us internet users, search engines do penalize paid links, so relevance is still the deciding factor in determining rankings.

Make no mistake: buying links is an extremely common practice. Chances are that your competitors have tried it, or are doing it right now. But when those links are ultimately identified as paid, search engines devalue them, and the site’s rankings will decrease as a result.

Duplicate Content

Writing content can be difficult, even on a good day. But writing totally unique, engaging content that ranks highly in search engines is harder. There are thousands of online services that allow you to syndicate content; in effect, allowing you to populate a website with content from another system without having to write a word.

On paper this technique sounds like a brilliant idea: fill the site with content, because the more content, the higher the rankings – right? Wrong. Search engines have sophisticated systems for identifying and devaluing duplicate content. This means that your website will quickly become little more than a repository of useless content.

There is a place for syndicated content: news streams are a perfect example. Once again, though, use your common sense and ask yourself, “Does adding this content provide value to my visitors?” If the answer is yes, adding syndicated content can make sense.

Keyword Stuffing

If you discuss SEO with anyone who built websites around the year 2000, they’ll often have the opinion that the more keywords you add to a page, the more relevant that page becomes to a search engine. The practice is called keyword stuffing: stuffing the page full of keywords for the sole purpose of tricking search engines into thinking the page is more relevant than it actually is. Today, keyword stuffing often makes your page less relevant for a keyword, rather than more relevant.

All the major search engines employ extremely complicated phrase, sentence, paragraph, and page analysis to every single site that they spider and index. Natural language patterns are analyzed, and keyword-stuffed pages – which bear little resemblance to natural language – are devalued. It’s that simple.

Cloaking

When a website presents one version of content to a visitor and a different version of the same content to a search engine, it’s called cloaking. There are dozens of ways to cloak web pages, and quite a few of these methods work very successfully, delivering high rankings for those web pages.
But make no mistake: cloaking is on all the major search engines’ blacklists. This is an extremely unethical technique that will result in your site being banned completely from a search engine if your tactics are discovered. And, given that your competitors are likely to have an eye on the tactics you’re employing and can easily report you, discovery is all but inevitable.

Once again, remember the mantra: develop websites that are optimized for the users’ experience as well as the search engines’ spiders.

Automated Link Building

Hundreds of applications and services on the market today claim to be able to develop thousands of backlinks to your site for next to nothing. This sounds like quite a deal, but as usual, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Using software or services to automate your link-building efforts is a bad idea. These systems work by submitting your website to tens of thousands of extremely low-quality directories, whose sole purpose is to receive submissions from automated software tools.

You’ll receive the 10,000 links, just like the software promises. However, what those selling the services fail to mention is that one relevant link from a trusted website in your industry can have ten times the impact of those 10,000 links.

Do the math, and it’s not hard to work out that your time is better spent focusing on quality, rather than quantity.

Content may be king, but it can easily be dethroned by a flawed technical implementation. By putting some consideration into the markup that surrounds it, you can make the content you’ve developed based on your keyword research work even harder for you.

From an SEO perspective, the development of the site needs to focus on the following:

• text-based site development wherever possible
• clean and logical site structure
• proper markup of key page elements

When developing any new website, or updating an existing site, applying these key principles will always give a solid, technical base on which to conduct your SEO campaign.

Throughout this section, we’ll bring a few important considerations to the web development side of any SEO campaign. We’ll show you snippets of markup where required, but will stop short of going into too much depth: we’re assuming you already understand how to create and edit HTML, and have the ability to influence the code on the site on which you’re working.

Text-based Site Development

Search engines, for all their complexity, are still relatively simple in the way that they understand how each piece of your site and its content fit together. They index your content content – be it images, videos, or any other media – solely based on the textual content of your HTML.

They still have difficulty reading text that’s contained in an image, video, or Flash file. Any use of rich media, such as Flash, should be considered progressive enhancement – that is, it should be built on top of a foundation that allows the site to function and still be usable without that media. This approach will ensure that your visitors will benefit from the rich site experience, but those without Flash (which includes the search engines), will be able to access your content in a plain-text form.

Always remember that the benefit of text-based site content is that search engines will, for the foreseeable future, be able to index your site more efficiently than a site that’s heavy on images and Flash-based content.

Clean and Logical Site Structure

The ideal site structure you drew up in the section called “Navigational Flow and Menu Structure” now needs to be put into practice. A good rule of thumb when structuring a website is to have your home page dedicated to your three most important and relevant keywords. Each level below that should focus on a core group of related keywords. The more diverse your target audience, the more silos of content you need to add into the site structure.

There’s no limit to the number of silos of content a website can feature. This should be based purely on the number of opportunities available for related sets of keywords that have sufficient search volume or commercial value. Just ensure that the structure you come up with makes sense on paper, or it will most likely confuse your visitors, as well as the search engines.

Valid HTML

Just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents composed in a markup language such as HTML can fail to follow the rules of that language. The process of verifying whether a document is properly formed according to those rules is called validation, and the tool used is called a validator.

Invalid markup can cause layout issues and also impedes the search engines’ ability to read and index your content. Ensure that your pages are valid by running them through the W3C’s markup validator2 and fixing any errors that are flagged.

You’ve probably seen QR Codes everywhere (if you’re not familiar, a ‘QR Code’ means Quick Response Code, and is a square scannable barcode intended for fast data delivery on a smart phone or other mobile application). They’re used in marketing materials, in airports, restaurants, in magazines, and more! They’re neat little nuggets of information that are downloadable at literally one click of a button. QR Codes are great for marketing purposes and should be used by every industry. QR Codes however have some drawbacks along with the advantages.

This is where Microsoft Tags come in. Like a QR Code, it’s a square scannable barcode intended for quick delivery of information: automatically opening a webpage, adding a contact to your address book, displaying a message, or dialing a number – there are no long URLs to type or SMS messages to send. It was developed by Microsoft to improve the usability of the traditional QR Code (originally developed by a subsidiary of Toyota in Japan, and is widely used all over Asia). At first glance, the only difference seems to be the visual style – QR Codes look like black-and-white mazes, and Microsoft Tags look like something from The Cosby Show (see below).

Here are a couple main points that you’ll need to know…

• Most people already recognize QR Codes and already have a free QR Scanner app on their smart phone or tablet. Microsoft Tags are less recognizable for now.
• Both codes can be created by anyone for free. QR Codes are hard linked to whatever URL you want people to go to when scanning it, and unfortunately if you need to change that link you have to make a new code. Microsoft Tags are re-programmable and can be changed indefinitely.
• Microsoft Tags are more versatile in what they can do once scanned.
• You can use just about any QR Reader to scan a QR Code, whereas you need Microsoft’s Tag Reader app to scan a Microsoft Tag
• QR Codes are slowly becoming more customizable (being able to change the design), whereas Microsoft Tags are HIGHLY customizable. You can use your own logo, colors, patterns, etc – whatever you can dream up!

So which one should you use? It depends on your needs. If you need something that everybody will recognize and know what to do with, and need it to go to a website URL then a QR Code is for you. If you want the code to be more versatile and do more stuff, and/or include more branding, and to reach out to a tech-savvy audience then a Microsoft Tag is what you need. Either way, using QR Codes and Tags is a great way to amp up your Mobile Marketing and Social Media Marketing in some very creative ways.

Below is an example of the differences between QR Codes and Microsoft Tags.

Search engines dislike being tricked into thinking that a website is more relevant than it actually is. That’s why buying paid links from other websites is an issue: it can have an undue influence on the makeup of a search results page.

Imagine what would happen if search engines openly allowed paid links without any punishment. The company with the deepest pockets would always be ranked first! Fortunately for us internet users, search engines do penalize paid links, so relevance is still the deciding factor in determining rankings.

Make no mistake: buying links is an extremely common practice. Chances are that your competitors have tried it, or are doing it right now. But when those links are ultimately identified as paid, search engines devalue them, and the site’s rankings will decrease as a result.

Hundreds of applications and services on the market today claim to be able to develop thousands of backlinks to your site for next to nothing. This sounds like quite a deal, but as usual, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Using software or services to automate your link-building efforts is a bad idea. These systems work by submitting your website to tens of thousands of extremely low-quality directories, whose sole purpose is to receive submissions from automated software tools.

You’ll receive the 10,000 links, just like the software promises. However, what those selling the services fail to mention is that one relevant link from a trusted website in your industry can have ten times the impact of those 10,000 links.

Do the math, and it’s not hard to work out that your time is better spent focusing on quality, rather than quantity.