By:James Doc Lewis


There's been much fuss lately as to the need for Search Engine
Optimization of the right kind; some will tell you that to be
effective SEO has to be "organic"; others will swear by the
power of using the right software, coincidentally, their
software. Then there are those who say that if you find the
right "niche market", the world will beat a path to your door
and leave their money when they get there. I even spoke with a
fellow yesterday who claimed that if you only launched new sites
when the moon was full... well, that's a whole other story. 

Where there is less conjecture is in the dire consequences
possible as a result of using the wrong kind of optimization.
Horror stories abound of the million dollar investments that
have simply gone down the drain when Google and the rest decided
that the optimizers had cheated in their enthusiastic rush for
the top. The early techniques of getting a website to the top of
the search engine results (link farms, cross linking, doorway
pages, keyword stuffing, and all the rest) have slowly been made
ineffectual by the steadily rising sophistication of the search
engine administrators,(and the algorithms they employ to keep
the race fair and assure relevant search results). 



So what is good SEO?

We could, perhaps, define SEO by function; we could talk about
the actions which bring about the optimization. First there's
research, hour upon hour of research must be performed for each
account. With such items as industry research (what's the
competition up to?), keyword research (how big is the market for
this product/service?), competition research (how many others
are already vying for this market?), marketing research (who
else has already done this before and what did they discover
that I better know about too?) Many hours, days, and sometimes
weeks can be spent getting a clear visualization of a plan
before the actual project can ever begin. 



To even start a website without the proper research is a
guarantee that: 

1. nobody will ever link to your site (World's Worst Web Sites,
excluded); 2. nobody, except maybe your mother, will likely see
your website; 3. your investment and business venture will
fail-miserably; 4. you will never be found in the major search
engines; and 5. your results will match your research (0=0).

We could approach the question of SEO from the perspective of
form. Every site is constructed differently, designed
differently, laid out differently, has a unique way with which
it interacts with visitors, and targets those visitors
differently. These are all factors that are considered during
the research performed prior to laying out a raison d'être for
optimization. Architect Louis Sullivan, argued that a building's
purpose should determine its design, stating emphatically that
"Form follows function." Shortly after, his student, Frank Lloyd
Wright argued, "Form and function should be one, joined in a
spiritual union." Although Sullivan and Wright were speaking
of architecture as it relates to concrete and steel buildings,
there's an architecture which goes into the design of a website
that, when done well, echoes Wright's observation very nicely. 



Good SEO will see to the writing or rewriting of the
content on each page to effectively work in all targeted keyword
phrases. A professional web-copywriter will be able to take the
SEO recommendations for keyword usage and incorporate them into
existing content in a way that reads naturally (i.e. does not
look like you jammed keywords here and there) and has the
ability to convert your visitors into paying customers. This is
no small order and if it is not performed well, the site will
remain just another pretty page that nobody ever sees. Or, worse
yet, your site will attract lots of visitors but they will
become confused by the copy and fly off to the next site without
ever taking the desired actions (sign up, buy, make contact). 



Another function of SEO, and one not often spoken of, is
cleaning up all extraneous code on the pages. Code bloat
removal, as it's so poetically referred to, is an art form in
itself. It requires a thorough understanding of html along with
all the rest of the coding and scripting languages which make up
a modern web page, as well as the ability to move it to a
separate file and importing it, when feasible, or trimming it to
it's bare essentials without changing the look and/or function
of the page itself. Eliminating page code bloat can be an
incredibly arduous task. Moving styles and JavaScripts is only
part of the puzzle. Many times, a page has to be almost
completely rebuilt due to the excess amount of junk code that
gets added in with the use of popular "WYSIWYG" page editing
software. 



To see what a search engine spider bot "sees" when it visits a
web page, go to the View button on your browser toolbar.
Move your cursor down to Source (PageSource in Mozilla
Firefox), and left click. What you are looking at is what
Backrub (Google), Sidewinder (Infoseek), T-Rex (Lycos), Gulliver
(Northern Lights), and all the others "look" at when they spider
a site. They read it the same way you do, from top to bottom.
Notice how much code and formatting are at the top of the page
and scroll down to find the content (this article). Taking all
of the code and paring it down to just what's needed and then
finding ways to trim that is part of what good SEO is about. Try
this on other sites you visit and you will soon understand the
situation. 


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