So what do SEO professionals REALLY do?

So what do SEO professionals REALLY do?

Many people these days ask the question "So what do SEO professionals REALLY do?", and I understand why. Search engine optimization is a difficult business to understand, but one thing is for sure: There's no better time to starting understanding SEO and how it can affect your business than right now!

To understand SEO (Search engine optimization) we must first understand a little about how a search engine works. Below I will detail a bit on what makes a search engine and how they operate.

The Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)

Any search engine has basically 3 parts, first is the spider, otherwise called a robot. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.

Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of a search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the database, is like a giant library containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with new information.

Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been "spidered" but not yet "indexed." Until it is indexed, it is not available to those searching with the search engine.

The Algorithm (Where Sites Appear and Why)

The third, and trickiest, part of a search engine is the ranking software. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant. All search engines have the basic parts described above, but there are differences in how these parts are tuned. That is why the same search on different search engines often produces different results.

Meta Tags (Helping Describe Your Website to Search Engines)

Here's the basic layout of meta tags and what they do. This is mostly for your web master or person who controls the web site, maybe you.







There are very many other meta tags which can be used, but I won't bore you with them here, they are very un-important to your ranking, and the above are what you should be concerned with.

Inbound Links (How to Increase Visibility)

Links to your website are extremely important. They tell the search engines your site is alive and happening. Search engines want to return results to web sites which are current, often updated with new information, and sites that are preferred by people. One of the ways they do this is by counting links. Search engines believe that sites that are linked to often are important, or are sites which people like. Gaining links to your site will convey this message to search engines, and they’ll act on it, returning you to the top of search engine results pages, generating traffic.

How to Gain Inbound Links 1. To get links submit your site to the major directories (Yahoo, DMOZ, etc.). Read each search engines guide lines and follow them strictly.

2. Request other similar sites to link to yours.

3. Create Award Winning Content.

4. Hire a Professional Search Engine Marketing Firm Gaining The Right Kind of Links Clearly, the optimal link to your site will contain your main keyword phrase. This is because search engine read too! They use the text in the link to find out what people think your web site is about.

Let’s say you have a website that sells car insurance online. When you solicit links, and fail to give guidance as to what the link should like, you will commonly get something along the lines of “Smith’s Insurance Ltd” as the link text. This is great if you want to be found for your company name and can compensate for the extremely broad term “insurance.” It is, however, far from the ideal.

The ideal would be something like “Cheap Car insurance - Smith’s Insurance Ltd“, whereby only “Cheap Car Insurance” contains the link. If this whole sentence is too long, simply “Cheap Car Insurance” or just “Car Insurance” is preferable.

There is also evidence, although not conclusive, that the title attribute can add a ranking boost. So let’s take the example above and show you the html code for it.

Car insurance

In the case of the very first example:

Cheap Car insurance - Smith’s Insurance Ltd.

If you do not specify the html code to be used upon successfully soliciting a link, you will very likely just end up with the following:

Smith’s Insurance Ltd

Or worse, http://www.smithsinsurance.com

(Note: This is why all those domains with keywords in their domain tend to do well.)

Clearly, this is not specifying the exact link text and code can lead to a waste of a good link text opportunity.

The solution, therefore, is to provide a webmaster who has agreed to link to you with the exact html code. This has two main advantages. First, the webmaster will be grateful, as all he/she has to do is copy and paste the code in his/her site. Second, you also get the text link that does your site the most good.

Reciprocal Links (Why reciprocal links don't work)

Links to your website are very important. The more links you have pointing to your website, the more important a search engine assumes your site is. A search engine can read - but it cannot comprehend. It can only consider how many other people like your site and use that to rank you. It's like anything else in life. If you know a guy and he has only one friend, he may or may not be a nice guy. On the other hand, if you know a guy that has twenty five friends, the chances that he is a bad guy are not likely. You would assume a guy having twenty five friends can be trusted a lot more then a guy having only one. Well a search engine assumes that a site with a lot of links most be a good one.

There is one exception to this (search engine algorithm) rule: Reciprocal Links Reciprocal links are not classified the same. A reciprocal link is when a website links to another website only to return the favor (link exchange).

Example: Reciprocal Link:

WEBSITE A links to WEBSITE B, and then to return the favor WEBSITE B links to WEBSITE A.

That is considered a reciprocal link exchange. This will get you nowhere in the long run. Search engines know that this is a webmasters link exchange to attempt to boost traffic and link popularity.

Example: Quality Link:

WEBSITE A has an article about "widgets" and links to WEBSITE B (widgets.com) which details even more about widgets.

WEBSITE B (widgets.com) doesn't link back.

WEBSITE A's link to WEBSITE B is a quality outbound link.

WEBSITE B's link from WEBSITE A is a quality inbound link.

Search engines love quality links. They will send you to the information that it thinks your looking for, and just incase it's not enough, the search engines know that there is a quality link there that will provide you with more. So get out there and start building some quality links to your site and you can bet that your online visibility will increase leading to more traffic and business.

And to answer the original question which sparked your interest to read this article in the first place, he's my educated answer:



SEO Professionals THINK with an educated and experienced mind..... I consider myself a professional SEO based on my industry experience and educated decision making....

SEO is mainly about making the right decision ahead of time, and making it work. SEO and being effective at it involves strategic decision making and knowing what is happening and what will happen with the industry in the future because an educated SEO knows where it has been.

Good SEO is not about building more links than the next guy or doing better meta tags...

It's about key decision making, timing, patience and persistence...

About the Writer:

John Colascione is the owner of Searchen Networks Inc., (www.searchen.com) a search engine marketing firm in New York. As the CEO, and founder of Searchen, all key decision making goes through John and the company takes very little new business. Searchen Networks work with a selected group of clients and truly enjoy search marketing and the challenges ahead. John has a long history of educating other technology driven professionals and enthusiasts about SEO.



So what do SEO professionals REALLY do? - To learn more about this author, visit John 's Website.

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	Thanks for the quick reply!