SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO): The Holy Grail

By Shobo Akinmayowa Adedoyin

*Important information to help your content rank better on search engines**Why you need to develop great and useful contents for your sites**How to stop wasting your money on useless digital marketing strategies**Are they really short cuts?*

The concept of SEO is interesting but widely misunderstood. Every Joe seems to be into optimizing your sites and bla bla. There are people who will tell you they can increase the ranking of your page so that your page will rank higher on search engine listing. For the most part, this is not true as Bill Weinman, a tech advocate and programmer revealed.

Essentially, any technique that can subvert the algorithms of search engines today will likely not work tomorrow because the engineers at the big search engines always update the algorithms to somehow cancel out these techniques. So at best, your SEO techniques will be like aiming at a moving target.

For example; the ‘keywords’ meta tag was originally designed to help search engines by allowing content authors categorize their contents. It was commonplace to use them until this feature became abused so badly that the search engines had to stop using it. The keyword tag is largely ignored today by the search engines.

Oh well… the SEO folks got wiser and started abusing the title tag later on; practically, just putting the same garbage they used to put in the keyword tag into the titles.

It is nothing short of pathetic that many content authors employ deception in the title of their contents to fool their audience simply for financial gains. The body is often different from what the title promised. Isn’t it just so annoying? Today, the traditional print media is also catching up with this bad habit. You would notice this trend a lot on the internet. The search engines; of course have learnt to ignore this too. 

 Accordingly, the goal of the search engines is to provide useful result for users (great user experience. right? They want to help categorize your content correctly and make it rank according to its actual popularity. The algorithms of the search engines make it easy for them to read your pages; to optimize it better; make it easier for those that like your page to see you. You would become popular because you attract the right audience. And when your page is popular, the search engines will recognize it as having more quality hits. It would rank it higher pushing it up towards the top of the list in relevant searches.

In concluding, it is important to emphasize that the best form of SEO is to develop good content. The reason is, it helps optimize your sites so both the users and search engines are able to find it, use it and ultimately, like it.

Thanks for viewing.

Acknowledgement: I want to use this opportunity to thank the team at Lynda (Lynda.com) for creating a great learning platform the internet users can truly benefit.