Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Introduction to SEO

Joe Laratro, President of Tandem Interactive

Welcome to the world of Search Engine Marketing. This column will include many relevant topics tailored for Small Businesses online. Everyone has heard of Google at this point. It was not that long ago when there were 20 or so “Top” Search Engines and getting listed on them consisted of everything from monthly submissions to quasi voodoo rituals. Today there is an industry built around marketing within the Search Engines. It has evolved from a cloak and dagger game to a symbiotic relationship between Search Engines and Webmasters / Marketers, where the searchers win by finding what they are looking for with ease.

Starting at the beginning, which came first the Search Engine or the Submission? Technically, that is a trick question because Directories most likely came first. The early search engines crawled the Web to find links. Crawling was inefficient because of the limitations of the crawlers (aka spiders). These Search Engines also depended on manual submissions by Webmasters to find new Web sites. Search Engine submissions have evolved quite nicely over the last decade. What started out as a simple “Submit URL” that accepted domains has become a registration process where the Search Engines interact with Webmasters providing valuable information and insight into registered Web sites. This process is now called 2nd generation submissions.

Search Engine submissions have a colorful past. There have been many programs to assist Webmasters in the submission process. While these programs could be used in a positive way (one submission per domain per engine), they could also be abused and send mass submissions to Search Engines. Mass Submissions, the automated process of sending every possible Web site URL in constant intervals, wasted the bandwidth of Search Engines and devalued possible important submissions.

Engineers that worked for the Search Engines were constantly finding news ways to prevent automated submissions and keep the process clean. Discovering new valuable Web content was still one of the top goals, but Spam fighting became a full time job. Search Engines created Spam editor positions to help keep their engines as relevant as possible. Spam editors teamed up with the Search Engineers to block automated submissions. They could identify IP addresses that were over submitting. They could flag Web sites that were being over submitted. At one point there was even a penalty for using the free submit option. It was more desirable for a Web site to be found through a Web crawl then because of a submission. One of the most successful innovations that they came up with was the image verification code (aka Captcha).

Automated programs did not have the ability to read graphic files. Therefore codes were entered into graphic files and displayed to ensure human interaction with the submission pages. These images were advanced enough to include noise around the text to prevent Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. For the most part automated submissions were dealt a swift blow.

There are several factors that led to the improved relationship and open communication between the major Search Engines and Webmasters. WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch were two very popular Web site / forums for the online marketing community. GoogleGuy joined Webmaster World as a representative of Google to answer the public’s questions. The advent of Search Engine Conferences brought Webmasters and Search Engines closer. In all honesty the Search Engine algorithms were getting so advanced Spammers were switching sides and abiding by the rules (Webmaster Guidelines).

When Google released the beta for Google Sitemaps in mid 2004, a new day was born for Search Engine Submissions. They came up with a free XML sitemap protocol for submitting a site to their index. It was different then the paid submission programs because there was no guarantee, it was free, and the submission variables were significantly different. The XML sitemap was not the actual breakthrough that makes it worthy of being called a 2nd generation submission technique. It was the Google Webmaster Tools interface, site registration, and insight into how they see Web sites that was the leap forward.

Take the time to register your Web site with the Sitemap programs listed below. This is a free service provided by the Search Engines and only requires a file or meta tag being added to the site. Once the site is verified, explore away. There is a wealth of knowledge about your Web site and how the Search Engines see your site that can be at your fingertips. These tools are great for beginners and those who are more familiar with Search Engine Marketing.

Where to go to sign up:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

http://webmasters.live.com/

Stay Tuned! Future articles will dive into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Meta Tags, Linking, Social Media Marketing, Press Releases, Blogs, Analytics, PPC Advertising, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and more.

Joe Laratro joined the Search Engine Optimization world in 1999. Joe served as CTO for a top SEO company for seven years where he worked for clients like Shop.com, CBS Marketwatch, Wells Fargo Financial and IBM UK. Joe is currently the president of Tandem Interactive. Joe was recently appointed to the Advisory Board of Webmaster World’s Pubcon.

SEO Web Site Development: Get your website designed which not only appeals to human
visitors but Search Engines as well.

           

Posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 11:52 am and is filed under Business, Computers, Internet, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.