Author Postmaster :)

Google is such a power search engine! The son of a mathematician and the a son of Computer science whiz’s start up in there University Dorms. Don't mess with Google let me give you some advice, there are two ways googlebot will analyse your site.

1. Site content
2. Site popularity (Measured by back links)

Basically this is ingenious democratic idea because if your site content is excellent, the link popularity will rise naturally! That’s why when making your site your not making it for the search engine, your making it for people that will give you the link popularity and in effect this pushes up the standards on websites and competition rises for creating excellent sites!

Site content pushed too far (jam packed keywords) could be as seen less important and spam by googlebot, lowering your ranking

Search Engine optimisation is now a thing of the past! Your main concern should be to creating a site that people will love and want to use.

Invest in designers, invest in programmes and programmers. Spend money on directories, Yahoo is $299 a year and many charging from $100-$10 to Free. Google sees your site as important if your willing to get and manage to get listed and is also a filtering system by human that filters Spam sites. That’s why google looks at directories listings as important!

But the best SEO advice I can give you is build your website legit, for people not for the little spiders running round the net.

Keep away from link building, link exchange, FFA sites and any sort of pay for traffic sites. Unless provided by google, yahoo, MSN and any reputable Directories.

Your points make sense, but at the end of the day while search engines run spiders to return results to users, if your page is ranked before the competition - you have a better shot at getting the custom :)

money is money :)

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Search engine optimization is very vital to the success of an online business. Sure, having a powerful and high impact web presence is bound to assist the company but if no one sees it then your investment might as well have been made in matchsticks. With SEO you get excellent rankings in the top directories and search engines and optimized copywriting for the web. I've recently been doing research on SEO to optimize our company's website and here are some interesting facts that I've noted:

42% of those who bought from online retail sites arrived via search engines.

46% of Internet users find new web sites via search engines. Word of mouth (20%) and random searching (20%) were the next most popular methods.

84.8% of people use search engines to find new web sites.

Internet users ranked search as their most important activity, awarding it a 9.1 on a 10-point scale. The next most important activity ranked only 6.3.

57% of Internet users search the web each day, making search the second most popular Internet activity. 46% say they look for product info, making this the third most popular activity.

It's futile to provide you with anymore than this. If you don't already recognize the importance and effectivness of SEO then feeding you these facts isn't going to help.

I never said SEO doesn't work... Search engines are changing.. New msn search coming, google already tackeld the problems and yahoo working on it. SEO is being cracked down on and soon what I say will remain true, what I say has alot to do with google. Can anyone agree with me on this?

Serach engine Optimasation is search engine Manipulating

Manipulating something, is not right.

Manipulating is a problem and search engines are cracking down on it.

also so what? Your throw percentages at me and whats your point there true. But the sites getting clicked on are the ones highest in the ranks and with the most link popularity. Are optimizers ******** themselves?

optimize ; To make as perfect or effective as possible.

manipulate ; To influence or manage shrewdly or deviously

These mean two totally different things. When you optimize a page so search engines can more easily crawl and index it, you adjust keywords and pay particular attention to what you place in your <title></title> meta desc H1, H2...H6 <b><i><strong> and their anchor text areas. You're not manipulating the search engine, that's harldy feasible. You're merely optimizing it for them. There is nothing dishonest or deceitful about it.

Where are you getting your information? Has someone brainwashed you?

Originally posted by Postmaster
also so what? Your throw percentages at me and whats your point there true. But the sites getting clicked on are the ones highest in the ranks and with the most link popularity. Are optimizers ******** themselves?

There is a reason these percentages exist. It's because people are optimizing (not manipulating) their websites for search engines.

optimize is just a nice way of saying manipulate. hello everyone I manipulate for a living. Doesn't sound good to me.

so thanks for the definition

Optimize = manipulate ; To influence or manage shrewdly or deviously

sounds about right what SEO do doesn't it? The world wide web wasn't even created with the intension of online business's anyway. More like an Information center.

I'll go along with part of Postmaster's point, to the extent that it echoes something I wrote here not long ago. Regardless of your search engine rankings for what you determine to be your important "keywords," if the visitors that result don't find an easy to use and relevant with compelling sales copy you're not being successful. The goal shouldn't be rankings, it should be conversions -- signups, sales, whatever is applicable to your situation.

That said, and this was the point of my earlier post, you should make sure that all of the basics of "optimization" are in place. But do so with the understanding that most if not all of your competitors are doing the same thing, because those basics are common knowledge. Keywords in title, alt text, backlinks, et cetera; anyone who's made a minimal effort at researching SEO knows about that stuff. Assume your competitors will know it as well as you do.

So at that point, what do you do? Unless you're willing to invest the time into researching the more arcane and advanced elements of SEO, or paying someone else who already has the understanding of them, make it your priority then to concentrate on your human visitors -- call it Human Visitor Optimization. Having the SEO basics in place will mean you should be getting a reasonable amount of search engine generated traffic. Having the elements of HVO in place will mean you're taking full advantage of that traffic -- making your SEO efforts pay off.

It's not necessarily a major concern if you're ranked number two for your pet search term and a competitor is number one. Most searchers visit more than one site anyway, and many don't click on the first listing automatically. If your site is effective, you may well be getting more conversions for your "second place" site than that guy at number one is getting. That is hitting him where it hurts; number one over number two is to a large extent only an exercise in ego.


Originally posted by Postmaster
optimize is just a nice way of saying manipulate. hello everyone I manipulate for a living. Doesn't sound good to me. Well, I know a number of SEO pros who refer to themselves as "professional search engine spammers." Only within certain friendly circles, of course... I wouldn't expect to see it on a business card. :)

The internet can reach into every facet of life. Maybe you're right, it may not have been created for business purposes but it has evolved and will continue to do so. Do you think it was created so that pornography addicts will be catered to in the privacy of their own homes instead of being forced to go to strip clubs? No. The internet has evolved and things are changing. Who cares if it wasn't created for business in particular.

I'm not even sure how you got on this subject...

Excellent advice content is king!
Don’t waste your money on Seo companies who lets face it
make promises they can't keep.

Originally posted by werebear
Excellent advice content is king!
Don’t waste your money on Seo companies who lets face it
make promises they can't keep. The real SEO professionals, those who really understand it, both profess your first statement to their clients (being the people who coined the phrase "content is king"), and make no promises at all (and won't take your money if they know they can't help you).

So I'd put your statement this way, personally: Don't waste your money on SEO charlatans, amateurs, and scan artists.

Realize that SEO's "guaranteed ranking" is just like the hosting industry's "unlimited bandwidth" -- it's not possible, and promises to give it to you rely on misdirection and misunderstanding.

I wasn't referring to SEO companies. I was stating the importance of a website that's optimized for search engines. You can have the most power, high impact, user friendly website around but if you don't have traffic then you're bound to flounder. Your PR doesn't doesn't guarantee all leads will convert to sales however having an optimized website is never a bad thing. No matter what.

#Postmaster

i think everyone knows that content is the key to a good site! no breaking news there.

"Search Engine optimisation": define what you think it is! it really seems like you understand it the wrong way...

optimisation= metatags, keywords, titles, how you build your site up! google is highly using those standards, and will probably do so in the future = better ranking for you if you know how to do it right ;)

Manipulating= evil software, hidden keywords, doorways, "javascripts", etc

"Invest in designers, invest in programmes"
why ? content is content if you have the right content it wont really matter much "within limits" ;)

only thing i can back you up in is
"But the best SEO advice I can give you is build your website legit, for people not for the little spiders running round the net.

Keep away from link building, link exchange, FFA sites and any sort of pay for traffic sites. Unless provided by google, yahoo, MSN and any reputable Directories."
but that aint new either :)

Got anything that can back your info up ? i would love to see it ;)

regards e-zone

optimisation= metatags, keywords, titles, how you build your site up! google is highly using those standards, and will probably do so in the future = better ranking for you if you know
how to do it right

Dictionary.com description = "the simultaneous optimization of growth and profitability"; "in an optimization problem we seek values of the variables that lead to an optimal value of the function that is to be optimized"; "to promote the optimization and diversification of agricultural products"

But of course this a nice way of calling it Manipulation.

Dictionary.com desciption Manipulation = Shrewd or devious management, especially for one's own advantage.

THE ONLY TRUE WAY FOR YOUR SITE TO GET RANKED IS THROUGH A DEMOCRACY OF BACK LINK POPULARITY

search engines have realized this and its your site that will bring up this popularity with what you put in it, but putting content for the intent of getting high rank won't get you anywhere anymore. Spiders use the content now just to categorise your site and depending of how much of it will make not as big impact as link popularity. Especially with google.

its not stated that its the same thing!

Manipulation: in a psychological context is influencing a person in such a way that the person who manipulates tries to get what he wants or makes a person believe something in a calculating, indirect and somewhat dishonest way e.g. by using arguments that the manipulator doesn't believe in himself. Or by witholding or distorting relevant information.

Ex: i optimize my body by training to get big!
i manipulate my body with pills to get big!

best way i could explain it so the meaning of the word stands out ;)

regards e-zone

Im not saying its the same thing... May you show me where I worte saying its the same thing? What I'm trying to get at is that Optimazation is a nice way of saying Manipulation...

I'm sorry but where do you draw the line between content and optimization? I use some techniques that could be considered SEO, but I consider them to be good programming practices. eg. I code for accessability on some sites, which requires for one, alt tags on every img and titles on every link.

My content may be rich in keywords I would like to be searched. My domains have a keyword. The page title has a keyword. The h1 tag has a keyword.

I don't see this as "Manipulation" I am simply making the page more likely to be ranked higher, WITHOUT comprimizing any of the content.

I have a feeling that you may be talking about more questionable practices that may already get sites banned from SE's

ehhh... Who knows I give up on this, I could be talking shiit, feel free to dispute without me.

Originally posted by Postmaster
search engines have realized this and its your site that will bring up this popularity with what you put in it, but putting content for the intent of getting high rank won't get you anywhere anymore. Spiders use the content now just to categorise your site and depending of how much of it will make not as big impact as link popularity. Really, that's not accurate. If it were, Google's search results would always be in order by PageRank -- but they aren't. It's very common to see a page outrank another which has a higher PageRank.

PageRank is Google's way of measuring the strength of the links pointing to page, the "democracy of back link popularity," as you call it. But it's only one of the elements that go into ranking. Among the others are the presence of the search terms (and, increasingly, related terms) in the content of the page, and in other on-page elements (taking your use of "content" to mean specifically body text), and on the linking pages themselves.

And yes, search engines use those things to "categorize" your pages. But what categorization means in that sense is "matching pages to search queries." After they do that, they also use those things and others (like PageRank) to rank the results.

Originally posted by Postmaster
ehhh... Who knows I give up on this, I could be talking shiit, feel free to dispute without me. Hey, you posted some controversial stuff there. You have to expect some discussion! ;)

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