SEO debabbled
All of this week, I'll be attending the Search Engine Strategies conference here in Chicago. It's the first time I've attended the event, and I hope to get a lot out of it. I'll be blogging daily about what I learn, so stay tuned. In anticipation of the event, it seemed like a good time to talk about SEO.Definition-wise, this is a pretty easy one. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Put simply, SEO is the process of improving your website to make it more attractive to the major search engines in order to draw more traffic. In the old days of search engines (remember AltaVista, Lycos, and HotBot?), SEO essentially boiled down to learning the rules each search engine or directory used to rank listings. Often, that meant gaming those rules, and firms promising to get you to the top of the search results for only $19.95 gave SEO a bad name.
With the rise of Yahoo! And then Google, though, search engines kept getting smarter, and over time SEO has, thankfully, started to converge with good site design. Clean, usable sites with strong content also tend to fare well on search engines these days, and that means that the worlds of SEO, design, and usability are finally coming closer together.
