Bobby Pham

For the past 3 years, people have been asking me what I do. At first, I told them Internet or Online Marketing, but then the assumption was that I sent out those spam emails. So I kind of gave up on explaining that because didn’t want people thinking that I was a part of that mess (although some of that is considered “Black Hat SEO” which I’ll get into later in this blog). So then I moved onto just saying Web Development because in a way, SEO does have to do with making changes to web sites. Now, I’m giving people more credit when I say helping sites to rank in search engines. Let me explain a little more :).

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to SEOmoz.org, “is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.” For those of you who are still lost, in summary, SEO is the process of organizing a site’s content, architecture, and internal and external structure and profile so that the site ranks higher in search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, etc.) for specific keywords (the words searches type in search engines to find the information they’re looking for). I hope I explained SEO as best as possible so that even those claiming to be non-tech, non-Internet savvy can understand.

Why is SEO important? Well, the majority of web traffic is driven by the major search engines, which include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, AOL, and Ask.com. If you’re not listed in the first few pages for your keywords, then you’re pretty much missing out on most Internet traffic. In fact, over 80% of searchers don’t even go past the first page. So needless to say, if you’re not on the first page (first 10 results), then you’re missing out on a lot of traffic.

See, this is how it works. Search Engines are like huge library or encyclopedia. When you enter keywords in the search query box of Google, you’re not searching the Internet for information. Instead, you’re searching Google’s database of information. Google and all other search engines have these little things called spiders (some people call it robots) which constantly crawl the Web for more information to add to the database. Each search engine has its own unique search algorithm which ranks web sites (although each search engine has different algorithms, they majority of them take into consideration the same factors for ranking a web site). These spiders use these algorithms to determine the importance and rank for each web site. These spiders are extremely smart I should also add.

So those “internal and external aspects” you need to improve are pretty much the same for all search engines. Such aspects include organizing the web site content, design, layout, architecture, coding, and its public Internet profile (it’s image across the Web). To give you an idea about one internal aspect of SEO, imagine the Title Tag. If you view the title tag of the homepage of my blog (www.bphamlinkbuilding.com). If you view the top of the browser where it’s bold, that’s the title tag, and for my blog, it should say “The Link Building Blog - BobbyPham.com.” That title tag is much more informational than if it were just “BobbyPham.com.” There’s more relevance and more information about the site that a search engine can quickly pick up. See, a search engine can more quickly tell that my blog is about “Link Building” than if the title was just “BobbyPham.com.” That’s one of the factors that go into the internal SEO aspect (most SEO experts call this on-page optimization). Thus, it is important to work on and improve these aspects so that you impress the search engine spiders and rank high for your targeted keywords. There are two types of SEO: White Hat and Black Hat. I’ll go into this just to make sure you know the difference and avoid being penalized for using spammy techniques.

White Hat SEO is considered ethical methods and tactics to improve your search rankings. Pretty much, it’s doing SEO the “right” way. Search engines love, love, and love content, especially research-oriented. A news site or research site that gets updated everyday with new content and information is very ideal. Anyhow, White Hat SEO is taking the time to build good content and organizing in a manner which pleases searchers. By pleasing searchers, you’re also satisfying the spiders (imagine the spider as a searcher, that’s what search engines aim to make their spiders operate like). White Hat SEO is the long-term approach to successful search rankings.

Black Hat SEO is considered spammy, unethical methods to improve your search rankings. An old trick that used to work in the early days of search engines was keyword stuffing. Webmasters used to stuff keywords in the white space their website in white text. So users wouldn’t see it, but spiders could. So in the white space of my blog, it would be “link building” all over the place in white text. Of course, this trick doesn’t work anymore. Search engine spiders have gotten extremely smart and detect most Black Hat techniques. But like spam and viruses, spammers will always find a way. Successful Black Hat SEO brings short-term success, but if Google or any other search engine detects any unethical technique being used, your site will be penalized or banned. Google and search engines hate spam.

Well, that’s SEO in a nutshell. I specialize in one particular area of SEO, however, some consider it the most important aspect of SEO. I specialize in Link Building, which is a combination of internal and external aspects. I’ll go more into Link Building in the next post. I hope this post better educates you as to what SEO is.