Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital tool for your Internet Marketing, but take care, there is a lot of rubbish and misinformation around.
Yesterday, I came across someone who was teaching “web design”. What he was actually doing was telling people how to put together a website using techniques that are nearly ten years old. For example, his “styling” was done using <font> tags – I don’t think that he knew anything about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). And the only SEO he was teaching was to put as many keywords as possible into the keywords meta tag and add a huge number of hidden keywords (font color the same as the background color) at the bottom of the page.
Not using CSS is SEO madness - using CSS is just so efficient at producing ‘search engine friendly’ web pages.
It has been well known for years that Google and most of the other major search engines just ignore the keywords meta tag so he was wasting his time here.
But worst of all, and the real SEO crime, was the hidden keywords. Not only has this not worked for nearly ten years, if you use it today Google will remove your pages from its indexes.
You really should learn how to put a search engine friendly web site together, but if you are going to take a course, say at night school, make sure that your tutor is right up to date – if web design is his/her day job that may be fine. If he/she is an IT teacher, beware!
And, of course, these days SEO involves significant work in “off site” optimization as well. More on that in a future post.
I did a 12 weeks of work placement in an internet marketing and SEO company and already found out that not everything I learned is right. But I’ll have the chance to do some more placement in a different company soon, so maybe I’ll get a better understanding then.