Well, I thought today I would talk about SEO… I can hear some of you going “what is SEO? A new type of car?” and the answer is, no, its an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, why talk about it? Because I have just spent quite a bit of time making SpikedEffect.com Search engine friendly so its at the forefront of my mind, and it’s also a big part of my job at work.

Why do you have to make a website search engine friendly? Shouldn’t the webcrawlers (what search engines use to index the World Wide Web) adapt themselves to accommodate for every website out there? In theory yes, it should be the responsibility of the webcrawler to adapt to and pick up your website’s content, but in reality, remember that the web is a vast array of information, and its not all uniform.

As new methods of displaying web content arise on the web the webcrawler’s job becomes increasingly difficult, and it just can’t accommodate for the wide variety out there…

That’s where SEO comes in, if you wish your website to have a good ranking on searches for the particular content you serve, then you need to adapt your website so that a webcrawler can search the content of your site more easily. Webcrawlers do not like dynamic links (e.g. http://www.domain.com/script.php?name=calculate&results=bad) in fact a lot of them turn away as soon as they come across a ? or a & as those two symbols in a URL show dynamic content exists at that address.

“As new methods of displaying web content arise on the web the webcrawler’s job becomes increasingly difficult, and it just can’t accommodate for the wide variety out there…”

So why does it choose to ignore it? Well think about it this way, say you mark the position of a parked car on a map, if the car is in use, it is very unlikely it will be in that exact position in a week, so there is no point marking the position of a car on a map because its bound to move. That’s the same way a webcrawler looks at links that appear to be dynamic, because in general yes links with &‘s and ?‘s are dynamic, and are designed to change on a regular basis…

The problem occurs when you have what they call CMS (Content Management System) based websites or websites that work very closely with a database, this is due to the content and aspects of the website being dynamically created from a easy to manage source (e.g. a database) but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the page wont be there in the long run, in fact a lot of the time if you pass that exact URL to the site a month later it will still work. Why? Because a lot of the time all the words and numbers that come after the ? and & characters are the conditions or identification variables for the content you are seeking…

Yet the reality is a webcrawler has no way to determine the difference between true dynamic pages and query URLs, so it takes the safe option and just ignores it. You aren’t out of luck though, there are techniques and methods to overcome this and that is what SEO is, it’s just a posh way of saying you are covering up the hard work happening behind the scenes to create pages and just make the pages seem like flat hard coded HTML pages to the webcrawler.

How though? Well the most commonly used technique is called URL Re-Writing, which is actually done by the server. What is URL Re-Writing? It’s kind of like the ability to speak a specially defined code to get the results you want, and you need to know the way the secret “code” is created to actually know what it has to do behind the scenes and that is what you teach (e.g. lots of hard work in coding) the server to actually do.

It takes determination to code this “understanding” into this server, especially for very complicated websites, as it will require a lot of Regular Expressions knowledge, and that takes a while to get a firm grasp of. I wont bore you to death explaining what they are, if you want to know, then click the word “Regular Expressions” as the purpose of this blog entry is not to teach you how to do SEO but simply what it actually is.

So ok, your saying to yourself, “ok, I think I get you, can I have an example?” course you can take the following:

http://www.somedomain.com/get-my-events-10-02-06.html

To any user this looks like a flat coded HTML, but in reality it would be run from a script which could even be as complicated as below:

http://www.somedomain.com/getcalendarevents.php?

user=txGfVbs&type=null&day=10&month=02&
year=2006&sort=asc&sortby=time

Now that is not very nice to look at is it? the first version was the SEO’ed version of the 2nd link, to a crawler the page would look like a flat HTML so it would actually look at the content, and index it for the search engine if it meets certain set criteria (e.g. hit count, subject etc..).

“So if you take the time and make the effort to apply SEO techniques you could find that your hit rate for your website increases quite dramatically.”

So if you take the time and make the effort to apply SEO techniques (I have only mentioned one of many – There are other methods like: metadata definition and choosing the correct content for your site etc.) you could find that your hit rate for your website increases quite dramatically, and if you make money from the website it will also increase your chances of raising more money from exactly the same content.

So that’s for today, you can now go head off smirkingly and astound people with the fact you have a new acronym to confuse them with, and just maybe you may have learnt something about the world wide web don’t get lost out there …