To optimise or not bother?

to optimise or not

[antipodes]

I've been reading a great lately about SE Opt., both here at WebmasterWorld and elsewhere.

It seems to me that some sites are almost defying what the experts are saying and get #1 listings regardless.

Take this site for eg. example.com
(I am nothing to do with this site whatsoever)

It has no meta tag keywords to speak of except for its name. It has no h1 tag (css styled h) and yet it is listed as the first site when I search for website design.

I am not an expert but I've seen many sites that seem to defy all i read about the subject.

antipodes

[edited by: heini at 1:47 pm (utc) on Mar. 4, 2003]
[edit reason] please, no urls / thanks [/edit]

[ppg]

what are its inbound links like?

[curlykarl]

"To optimise or not bother?"

If a site has the right content and has been put together properly it may not need to be optimised :)

Personally I think optimisation is a good thing to do, you may already have a gret site but spending a little bit of extra time can only help improve things further.

My 2 penneth :)

[antipodes]

I don't know the inbound links situation but this site (like so many others:) is barely optimised if at all really. I appreciate links may have some role in this, but not links alone surely.

I am seeing a number of these sites as i take a look around. I wonder how much seo need is artifical.

I will continue looking at this subject.

antipodes

[caine]

optimaization does not have to equal spam.

Content is King, and the content interspersed across, an appropriate (easily crawled) navigational structure will always do well, and then loads of links to strengthen it.

The days of Meta's, H1's, etc. are dying. Their's probably life to squeze out of them yet, but i would'nt use them as a strategy to get high ranks.

[stavs]

very strange - doesn't seem to have any inbound links and the PR is only 4.

I'd be pretty interested to know more about how this has happened.

[jimbeetle]

I've found that for these 'mystery' sites doing a link.all on alltheweb is much more effective than Google. You might find a boatload of backlinks with good keywords in the linktext. That quite often answers the Why.

In these same mystery cases I've often noticed that many of the pages the backlinks were on also had the keywords in the title and elsewhere on the page, leading me to believe (not confirm) that Google might give more weight to these links.

Jim

[caine]

Also for search terms, just becuase you've got low PR, does'nt mean you can't rank #1, this is a fallacy.

[caine]

Go back to the base url, PR 6, same company. 38 inbound links. Good directory listings.

The page is a doorfront. Targetting a specific term, site may even have hundred, and how says spam is dead.