Website Optimization

What is it? Should I be doing it?

[daya20]

I'm starting up a new internet business and I'm trying to figure out this advertising mess. can anybody tell me what website optimization is, and is it something i should be doing? I've heard some say you must and others say you shouldn't because google and yahoo are savvy to it...

[ebound]

BROAD question!

Try searching the WebmasterWorld library [webmasterworld.com].

You will find gems like:

The famous 26 Steps [webmasterworld.com]
Building the perfect page 1 [webmasterworld.com]
Building the perfect page 2 [webmasterworld.com]

Read WebmasterWorld daily.

Good Luck.

[caveman]

daya20, welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Yours is a question I'm hearing more and more latley.

Here's my 2 cents:

SEO, despite its somewhat shady reputation, is an important part of an overall Web marketing strategy, if done prudently.

Leading reps from Google, Yahoo! and MSN will all tell you, if you attend the conferences, that SEO is a good thing. That is, SEO defined as making a site clear, understandable, easy to use (and easy for the bots to crawl), etc.

What is high risk is trying to trick the SE's using questionable tactics (overuse of keywords, sneaky redirects, etc.).

There are a lot of potentially high ranking sites out there that are not ranking, or not ranking up to potential, because they don't understand the value of SEO.

[justdave]

Yes, optimization is something you should definitely do, IMO. Have a clean, easy to spider website can make a huge difference in where you rank on the search engines. Yes, SE's know are savvy to it, which is why they have guidelines for what is acceptable and what is not.