The Rules for SEO have changed

Feature article by Anne Kennedy

The Internet has grown to nearly two billion pages. To keep up, search engines are consolidating and sharing resources in broad based efforts to index as much as possible for their users and maintain profitability at the same time. The resource load on top online search media is heavy and growing, and so is the trend toward conserving demands on bandwidth, transaction volume and server space.

This means SEO has changed.

What works today is searchable content, links to and from your site, and judicious use of paid placements. Savvy Web marketers need to make sure the content of their website appeals to target users and is clearly accessible to search engine spiders, and link their sites to relevant and popular sites.

The SEO tactics that worked last year may, in fact, decrease rankings or worse, remove your site entirely from search databases. If your site's search rankings depend on any of the following, your SEO is out of date. If a Search Optimizing Service suggests these techniques, find one who is current on website marketing best practices.

Resubmitting/Automated submitting:
Submitting a site more than once in a short time frame is considered spam by the major search engines. AltaVista gives preference to older submissions, so resubmitting a site, thereby tagging it with a fresh date, will actually decrease the site's ranking. Google prefers to find a site, rather than have it submitted.

Why? Repeating submissions overloads their resources. Submitting a site by automated software, even for the first time, is frowned on by all the major search media. AltaVista has made auto submissions impossible. Human directory editors will label a site spam if it is repeatedly auto-submitted to them.

Indexing in hundreds of search engines:
There are only a handful of search media that matter for most Web sites: Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Google, LookSmart, About.com, The Open Directory Project, Lycos, Excite, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves and Overture (formerly GoTo). While there are also topic--specific search engines, most of the other so-called "search engines" on the longer lists are just links farms which automatically swap links between your website and lots of irrelevant sites, no substitute for a highly targeted and relevant links to a from your site.

Free submissions:
Nearly all the major search media have some form of revenue-raising paid placement plan. While all but Overture assure you placement only, not ranking position, these are extremely effective at quickly gaining critical links from popular web media, helping to improve sites' performance in search results. Paying a subscription fee is the only way the Inktomi database, with its finite number of URLs, will guarantee that a site is replaced in their database when it refreshes every 48 hours. The good news is sites that change content frequently will have their new content indexed quickly by Inktomi, and appear in the partners using that database: MSN, AOL, and Overture's secondary results.

Meta Tags:
Few search engines consider meta tag content in current algorithms anymore to determine rank. While the meta description tag shows up on some search results, search results usually return snippets of content from pages. Long meta tags, or meta keyword tags containing words that don't appear in content will actually downgrade a sites' ranking.

Doorway Pages:
While there are some logical applications for creating simple pages that point to a larger site, those created to appeal to individual search engines are frowned on by every major online media. Top search engines have a huge and growing workload trying to index information on the Internet. Excess pages only clutter their paths, impede progress, and generally tick them off. Not a good thing, since the search media make the rules about how the Web is indexed.

Cloaking (aka Dynamic page swapping):
Every major search engine says they will ban your website if they catch you engaging in the deceptive practice of using one set of data on a page to attract a search spider, and then swapping in your real home page to deliver to the searcher. While cloaking goes on, and some don't get caught, you really have to ask yourself if it's worth the risk of having your IP address banned form the Web for all time.