The Definition of Optimize

Oxford English Dictionary Definition:

optimize (also optimise)

• verb - make the best or most effective use of (a situation or resource)

The world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is plagued by the most irritating people in web design. Day after day I read new material, whether on forums, articles, abused social networking sites or some crappy website loaded with hidden keywords, which claims to hold the ultimate secret to SEO, or claims that the best way to "do SEO" is to submit to directories, or the worst one, when somebody replies to a plea for advice with "Get more backlinks".

The reason that these people are such a problem in the area of SEO is usually because they don't belong there - many of them have simply misunderstood or never even contemplated the meaning of SEO. I believe the clue is in the 'O'...

Above is the Oxford English Dictionary definition of 'optimize' and it says pretty much what I expected it to say when I looked it up: "to make the best or most effective use of"

The fact is, that to 'optimize' your site for search engines is simply to modify it to the point that it will be in the best condition to be recognized by search engines for the terms that the user enters that are relevant to the subject matter of your site/page.

This definition automatically rules out artificial backlinking and all forms of spamming as having ANYTHING to do with optimization.

It's not wrong to advertise your site by, say, paying for a backlink from another site, but it is not optimization, it is more to do with publicizing your site.

promotion

• noun - 2 the publicizing of a product or celebrity. 3 the activity or business of organizing such publicity

Another dictionary definition. This is the category under which most of what the uneducated think is SEO comes under.

Bottom line - promote your site as you please but don't call it SEO. Remember that SEO has far more to do with what you do ON the page than what you do off of it. Learn what SEO is really about, which is optimizing your excellent content to be recognized by search engines as being excellent.

Do You Want To Know The ULTIMATE SEO Secret?!

There isn't one.

How to do SEO Badly

A lot of people seem to be woefully ignorant of what SEO is, and refuse to listen to the wisdom of the more intelligent designers and webmasters who generously share their advice.

So here is the penultimate strategic guide of how to do SEO badly:

1. Never create unique/funny/interesting/credible content - why bother when you could just copy someone else?

2. Get hold of a huge list of e-mail addresses - if you disrespect somebody's inbox by filling it with crap they don't want, they're sure to want to visit your site.

3. Three words: backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. Make sure you put them everywhere,
predominantly in the least relevant places.

4. Definitely post your URL on a .gov or .edu guestbook, because if you have a backlink from a site like that, you'll be the king of Google in no time.

5. Get 2000 reciprocal backlinks. Viewers of your website will love trying to navigate through all the links to irrelevant websites.

6. Make sure you hide keywords in places that the search engines can see but the viewer can't for an extra boost.

7. Sitemaps are for losers.

8. Your top priority for your content is for the search engines to like it. Don't listen to these idiots who tell you that you should design your site with the viewer in mind.

9. Design your site in flash. It's awesome.

10. Social bookmarking was invented so that you can bookmark peoples sites in exchange for them bookmarking yours. Exploit sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon to the max.

11. Remember, it doesn't matter what sort of visitors you are bringing to your site or whether
their needs are relevant, just so long as you are getting lots of them.

12. Remember, SEO is all about learning the secrets! Look for people in forums who claim to hold the ultimate key to unlocking huge traffic to your site, those people really know what they're talking about.

13. The most important value in SEO is Google PageRank. That little green bar is the God we all
bow to. If my site is PR6 and yours is PR5, you must look
up to me as your superior. The green bar has spoken.

I hope that was helpful

;)

Red link backgrounds - firefox add on to blame!

Recently, red backgrounds have been appearing on my links in my browser and it was doing my head in! i looked on a couple of forums but despite the amount of problems people were having nobody knew how to get rid of them.

Turns out it was a Firefox add-on that was doing it - and not the web developer toolbar like a lot of people thought. It was 'SEO For Firefox', an add on that gives you information about a sites SEO status.

If you have this add-on and are suffering from the same problem, its easy to fix:

Right Click >> SEO For Firefox >> Options

And its the enable/disable highlighting option

Hope this sorts your problem out!

Centering divs/Centering your page

People often ask questions about centering divs, or how can I center my page?

Well there a fair few centering techniques out there, but heres one I find particularly useful.

It supports skinny web designs, that is sites that don't use the entire screen. Usually, these pages' HTML is set out so that there is a wrapper div (or a containing div) around the rest of the divs and content. This is the div that you need to center.

The way I go about it is to give the wrapper div a percentage value, we'll use 80% in this example. Then, take the remaining percentage (in this case 20%) and half it (10%.... obviously :D). Then give the wrapper div a left-margin of 10% (or whatever number you came up with).

Now the wrapper div will always appear centered, and therefore all of the inner divs will be centered along with it!

Digg ditches Google and teams up with Microsoft

Digg.com, the popular user-provided news site, has sacked Google as its ad provider, and instead struck a three-year deal with Microsofts younger 'adCenter'.

The deal came as a surprise to the users of Digg, as the site has be known to support Apple and Unix, and practically campaign against Microsoft and its Windows systems. One Digg user, Lemonblood, stated simply, "Today is the day Digg died."

It has been suggested that Microsoft may have offered a revenue share that was too good to turn down, despite the fact that they may not make anything at all on them.

The deal has been likened to the one that Microsoft did with social networking site facebook last August. People are expecting to start seeing these deals take place with other such sites, for example, the fastly growing yet unfinished Sceneparty.com

I guess we'll have to wait and see

Free Directories - huge list

Found a big list of free directories that I thought you might be interested in:

DirectoryCritic.com

Hope you find it useful!