Optimising your website/blog for the search engines – not!

Well I may have bitten off more than I can chew here. I’ve spent hours pondering how to present this post and give you some really useful stuff for optimising your website.

The final result? My best advice? Don’t. Specifically, you don’t.

I’ve spent years, literally, learning the fine art of SEO (search engine optimis(z)ation), if they had a degree in it (they probably do) I’d have a doctorate, and I wish I’d never started.

It’s a bloody nightmare. The degree of accuracy required combined with the mind numbing tasks involved means it’s a full time job, which means your real business suffers.

If you’ve got the resources – outsource it. Find some sallow faced, short sighted hermit to put everything in place and then change everything again when google or yahoo change their algorithms. You. You concentrate on the business.

If you’re skint then just do the basics. Go to google’s webmaster section and put a day aside just to get your head around the concept and the basic rules. Follow these rules as you add content to your site and you’ll be 80%’ish of the way there. To get 100% of the way just takes too much time.

The one thing that you can do to tip the odds in your favour, if you haven’t got a small army of SEO hermits, is to boost the quality of your content. Google’s (etc) one and only job is to ensure that their users, the searchers, find the most relevant results for their search.

If your content (blog posts are best) is good then web2.0 will link to it. When you have 10’s, 100’s, 1000’s of twitter/bebo/facebook/digg/mixx/delicious links pointing at your post google is going to think you’re relevant to something. Along comes the google spider and, if you’ve learnt the SEO rules, decides that your content is relevant to a given topic. Bang! Job done. Next time someone types in a phrase relevant to your site you will now be found higher up the search results – because your content was good.

Concentrate on your skills and talents and reflect those in the content you post.
Let surfers easily link to it via web2.0.
Make sure you follow SEO basics
Write some more quality content

hiremyparents will soon be releasing its ‘Luddite’s Guide’ series to members and readers of the blog. A completely free guide to getting the basics right for your website and getting the traffic it needs. Come back often for updates, or better yet, subscribe via email or RSS for news on its release.

PS – please make a comment or web2.0 me to practise what I preach.

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