White Hat Organic SEO

Search Engine Optimization

Life teaches you that it’s hard to get noticed, especially if you are a website competing for attention on the internet where there are BILLIONS of indexed web pages worldwide. Search engines like Google help level the playing field, but ultimately success requires a strategy.

Despite thunderous email pitches to the contrary, there are no long-lasting shortcuts to getting your website noticed on the web. You can, however, use certain techniques to help your site stand out from the competition.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is, in part, the art of using semantic markup to structure the text and images that form your website. Done correctly, search engines will effortlessly and accurately categorize and index your pages. This can help your website move closer to that elusive first page in the search rankings for specific keywords and key phrases that generate results from those indexes. Without ‘good bones,’ no amount of additional SEO work is going to prove cost effective.

“There are what’s known as ‘White Hat’ SEO practitioners and ‘Black Hat’ practitioners. Put another way, there are the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys.’ We’re one of the good guys.”

We practice informed SEO techniques by optimizing new web pages as they are designed, not as an afterthought. We start, but don’t end, with the HTML markup itself. It’s the building block upon which all else is based.

Positioning of content and images is handled with CSS -- Cascading Style Sheets. Unlike humans, search engines don’t care about what your site looks like. By emphasizing the actual text that makes up the content of your website, the search engines won’t have any artificial walls to run into that might stop them from reading and indexing your page content. Further, separation of content and presentation guarantees that the ‘bones’ of your site will stand the test of time as display and browser technologies evolve. Any changes that might be needed to accommodate that evolution should be relatively straightforward and painless.

For those who are interested in such things, Google themselves has posted a web page titled “How Search Works” that does a nice job of giving you a mile high overview of search itself.