Search Engine Questions
Hope this is the right forum; wondering if someone could answer these for me.

1. I have heard a rumor that putting keywords in html documents themselves "invisibly" (e.g. words the same color as the background) is a good way to have your site get more search engine hits. It doesn't sound very true; is it?

2. Besides using Meta Tags and linking to high traffic sites, what other ways are there to increase search engine hits/rank (and thus user hits).

3. What is a basic definition of Search Engine Optimization, and why would you need a "professional" to do it?

Thanks,
scott

p.s. sorry if these have been gone over and over, but it didn't seem like in my search of the forums this had been discussed recently

Oh my, I'm glad you're asking these questions, because you've been fed some horribly misconstrued knowledge about search engine behavior and site optimization!

1. Doing anything invisible is a good way to get your site banned from search engines. SEs do not take kindly to people attempting to thwart their ranking algorithms, and they won't think twice about banning you if they see you acting in this manner. It is not an easy road back into their good graces once you've crossed this line.

2. Meta tags do nothing for rankings, nothing whatsoever. Linking to high-traffic sites does nothing either. So you can drop these two strategies for increasing your rank. Receiving links from high-traffic sites with content relevent to yours is helpful, but only because this means you have a connection to quality traffic, not necessarily because your SE rankings are going to improve. The best strategy for building yourself up in search engines is to think hard about what a human being would find to be helpful, such as content rich with relevent ideas and phrases, fresh content, updated on a continual basis, a clear understanding of your informational structure (headings, subheadings, etc.). This is what gets the most attention, particularly if you do regular updates.

3. There are two different types of optimization. I don't know that there are official words for this, so I've made my own:

Developmental SEO
This relates to how your site is engineered, whether you've used semantically correct markup, your code is lean, you have good alternative text for images, you've removed superfluous imagery and relegated it to style sheets, used titles for objects where appropriate, summaries for tabular data, etc. Thoughtful engineering will take you a long way, and a seasoned design professional will be understand all of this and will construct your site accordingly. Developmental optimization is something that typically only needs to be done once if it is done properly. Developmental SEO doesn't typically come with a price tag, but you can expect a professional with the necessary knowledge to charge a higher rate in general to reflect the quality of work he or she does.

Strategic SEO
Strategic SEO picks up where developmental SEO leaves off. This is where you put thought into your ongoing updates, new content and tweaking your existing content to ensure you're targeting terms that are most important to you. Good strategic SEO involves a considerable amount of research, both to see what your competition is doing and to track fluctuations and SEO opportunities by analyzing traffic logs. This can be a very costly, yet very rewarding engagement, if you choose a reputable SEO specialist to handle your ongoing SEO needs. Count on a solid SEO campaign running anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars per month. The expense is easily justified when it results in significantly improved traffic and sales, if sales are your end goal.

I hope this dispells some of the myths you're holding and makes it clear just how important a professional perspective can be when it comes to search engines :)

Yes, your reply clears a few things up.

However, if meta tags and/or links do not help you get more search engine hits, how does a person promote his site up the rankings ladders of those search engines?

Does a person just focus on making a clean, well thought-out website and hope (after submitting the site to google, yahoo, etc.) that the traffic comes in?

thanks,
scott

Well, links help you get real life human traffic, so you're winning half the battle anyway. Remember, the search engine is nothing more than a means to the end. If you're achieving the end, then you should be happy!

But to be more specific, I think you're getting the right idea about having a clean, well thought-out site. There's an age-old mantra around the development community: content is king. I'd like to add to that...

Good content, presented well, is king.

Looking a bit more into this ... is a robots.txt essential for achieving the "end" result of the search engine noticing you? (or the meta tag version of it?).

I also read in a tutorial in this forum that adwords is a very good way to get links, and therefore a higher search engine ranking, or at least higher traffic. Is this true?

Thanks for your continued replies,
scott

robots.txt is the file that carried rules for spidering your site, which all well-behaved search engines are supposed to follow (all of the major SEs are well-behaved). It's only essential if you don't want to give SEs unbridled access to your site content. For the record, SEs cannot enter permission-based areas of a site. Anything requiring a login will stop a search engine. So you do not need to specify anything in a robots.txt file to keep search engines from indexing private information.

adwords may be an effective way to generate traffic. I have no idea if or how it affects rankings, but given Google's stance on its ranking algorithm, I have to believe it has no effect. You can't buy a higher rank in Google; you can only earn it (in theory, anyway). I can't say whether or not adwords increases your ranking in other SEs.

Thank you so much for all the information. I'm sure there's a lot more to learn, but I feel I have a better starting off point now.

If you could recommend some other sites to look at for other information about all of this, I would be grateful.

Thanks,
scott