Hi, I m Laura Lippay, SEO Specialist at CNET Networks in SanFrancisco. Today we are going to talk about SEO 101. SEO is short for searchengine optimization and what that is is trying to get your pages and your siteto rank high in search results. First let s talk about site structure. Let ssay we have a website about mechanical pencils. We have two different brandsand three different styles. This page right here has six different things tooptimize work: mechanical pencils, brand A, style 1, Brand B, style 1 and style2. There are a lot of things you re optimizing for on this page so your topicis a little bit diluted. What we want to do is break this up into separatetopics.
This, the mechanical pencil page, instead of having all ofyour information here on this page, let s put a little bit of an overview aboutmechanical pencils, the overview page. Then we re going to break this down.Here we have a Brand A page. This is about Brand A, we ll mention style 1 here.Here we have a Brand B page which is about Brand B and we have style 1 andstyle 2 mentioned here. To break it down even further, here we have a page forBrand B and style 1, a very targeted page. So let s say we have somebody outthere that s searching for Brand B, style 1. What we want them to do is to gostraight to this page. That s what they re looking for, that s what we wantthem to find.
Number two, link relationships. The web is a very socialplace and for the search engines to see this, what they re looking for is therelationships that you have between other sites and the relationship that yourpages have between other pages. So what they want to see is that people arepointing to your site. Let s say for this example, we have site A which isJoe s website about cameras. Then we have site B which is CNET. Site A mighthave Betty s site linking to it, his dad s site linking to it, the camera storeon the corner linking to it. CNET might have CNN linking to it, MSN, News.com,Dell and HP. Because these sites are big sites out there on the web, they givea little bit more importance to the CNET site than a smaller site like Betty ssite, Dad s home page, the camera store on the corner.
Number three is content. What you want to have is qualitycontent and original content. The more quality content you have, the morepeople are going to naturally link to your site, the more people are going tocome to your site. Original content. Try not to steal everyone else s content.You can use RSS feeds but make sure you have your own original content on thepage tier which is good for users and it s also good for search engines.
Number four, information design. Where the content is onyour page is important as well. What search engines do is they try to discernwhat they consider noise from the actual content so in a traditional kind oflayout that you have here, we have advertising here, a lot of times we ll havethe navigation here and a lot of times we ll have the marketing here. Thenyou ll have your main content right here in the middle. Let s say you have awebsite about mechanical pencils. Where you want to have mechanical pencilsmentioned and where you want to talk about it on the page is up here, notreally here and not really down here because if you have these three pages thatare all talking about mechanical pencils—it s mentioned here on this pageand it s mentioned here on this page. This page is likely to rank higher giventhat all other things will be the same.
Number five is code. What you want to try and do is havelight clean pages, light clean code. What I mean by that is link to JavaScript, link your CSS and keep as much clutter out of the code as possible. Theother thing that you should know is there are two different types of SEO. Wehave white hat SEO and we have black hat SEO. White hat is doing SEO using alot of usability, keeping the user in mind, trying not to do any tricks, whatwe call search engine tricks or search engine spam. Black hat SEO is you can dothese tricks for the search engines that will get you high results but theywill usually drop off after a while or you could also be banned and when sitesare banned, it s really hard to get them back.
Last but not least, traffic and popularity. If you have goodcontent, a lot of people are going to be coming back to your site if it suseful; if it is quality or has a lot of content, people are going to come backnaturally. There are other things that you can do to try and get people to comeback to your site. You can prompt people to bookmark your site. You can put outpress releases, you can talk about what s new in the industry on your site. Youcan also do blogs, do podcasts, anything that keeps people coming back formore. Also think about having people sign in and come in to do reviews or addtheir own content to your site to talk about rating things and forums andthings like that.
These six points that we covered today are just a few ofmany, many, many things you can do for search engine optimization. One thingyou want to remember is that you always want usability first. This is what thesearch engines are looking for, user friendly pages and a lot of times if I mweighing, Should I do this for SEO or should I not do this for SEO? I thinkabout it, usability, what s the best user experience and I go in thatdirection.
i made seo too ! 
