What is SEO?

A few years ago, SEO was crucial to the success of a website. It was necessary to learn the techniques that search engines used to rank their results, and then ensure that the pages of the website used that knowledge to rank well themselves.

Usual techniques included excessive use of the keyword in the title and description of the file; keyword stuffing (ie excessive use of the word in the keyword field); and then a liberal sprinkling of the same keyword in the titles and text. Ideally, pictures on the page would have the same keyword repeated excessively in the ‘alt’ field, and if you were very reckkless you could include a whole paragraph of invisible text at the bottom of the page, just to get the message across.

Getting links was also simple - do as many link exchanges as possible with all and sundry, relevant or not, and the job was finished. This could also be achieved using various link-farm / link exchange software that avoided the need to actually search for link partners.

These tactics have all been stamped out one by one, and now many of them will lead to your site being penalised. Hidden text and excessive use of keywords (i.e. in an unnaturally large quantity) will get your site penalised, typically by disappearing from the search results.

In principle link exchanges and links from irrelevant sites will not get you penalised, but will not help either. This is because otherwise we could get other peoples sites penalised by linking to them from ‘bad neighbourhoods’. I suspect this isn’t the whole story - that lots of irrelevant link exchanges and links from irrelevant sites can actually harm your results, but I don’t have definite evidence. so i’ll keep that thought to myself for the moment.

To complicate matters further, google et al now also look at the context of the page, and decide whether it is relevant. So if I added a link here to studiesinseo.com it would count as a real link, but if I add a link to pokergamblingnews.com it wouldn’t, because the subject of this page is completely different from the subject matter of the poker site.

So, the trick is to make the page as natural as possible. Natural and useful links out from the page. Similarly, links in from appropriate relevant sites. Natural writing, with the search keyword in context, and used only a ‘normal’ number of times. You get the idea.

So the question is, do we need SEO experts to make a page as natural as possible? Or more simply do we all just prepare pages that actually are normal, natural and informative? As we would if we had never heard of SEO in the first place.

Sure, we need to know about HTML and how pages are laid out (ie we have to know to use the