SEO Basics 101 – part 1

A few years ago if you put the right keywords in the title and meta (keywords and description) tags, you could quite easily get to the top of search engines, especially when mixed in with a few links and repetitions of the keyword in the body text.

But SEO isn’t all so simple any more. Otherwise, people would manipulate search engine results so much that they become useless. In a way, all of SEO is “black hat” – using bad methods to manipulate search engine results rather than just letting them show 100% natural results.
That isn’t to say that the contents of a title tag etc is worthless – no, far from it. But some things, such as the meta description tag is quite outdated now. Not many search engines, certainly not the major ones, take much notice to the meta description, or even keywords, tag. Don’t even ignore these though. Search engines still use the description tag to describe your site in search engine result pages. To be honest, these should be aimed more at actually drawing a user in when they read it than trying to manipulate search engine results with it.

There are many “new” methods that people have only begun to realise helps within the last couple of years. For example, refrencing your sources in an article can often help, especially if they are external sites. However, this relates to the general outgoing links is good rule. Don’t depend just on in-coming links to your site.

The anchor text of links is a very large contributing factor for search engine results. Just take a look at a Google search for failure. That was pretty much 100% done by bloggers just using the anchor text in links to www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html.