SEO 101 | The Beginning SEO Podcast

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Welcome to the Beginning SEO Podcast. Our 2 hosts are Brian Mark and David Brown. We’re doing this podcast because we’ve looked around online and haven’t been happy with the information we’ve seen for beginners. There are some sources for more advanced topics, but not much for beginners. Those that we do find seem to give lots and lots of REALLY bad advice. Really bad. We won’t mention any names, but things like cloaking good or bad? Well, it depends. No. We’ll tell you no, it’s bad. Beginners should never try it.

We’re going to try to lead you down the right path from square one - just starting out - and that’s why we’re doing this.

Our qualifications:

Brian Mark - Been a speaker at Search Engine Strategies for a few years. Run and developed the website for a company that is now on the Internet Retailer Top 500 company, but started in 1999 when the website was doing just a few orders a week.

David Brown - CEO of Top SEO Consultants.

The idea behind SEO - If you have a keyword you want to rank for, you should be able to pop that in your favorite search engine and find your site towards the top. There’s nothing Dave loves more than an SEO firm claiming to be one of the top firms and you can’t find them in Google until page 5 or 6 for their own name.

Dave has been doing this full time for 4 years now.

Both moderators / admins at WebProWorld where we’ve been helping newbies for a long time. You’ll also have the ability to ask us SEO questions as we make this into an interactive blog. We’ll answer your question and tell you our opinions on the topic.

David runs the NeoBlog.

Brian has a few other blogs as well, such as oneboxer, where Google onebox is duscussed.

Basically, we’re a couple of computer geeks that have been doing this for a long time and like to have fun. You’re not going to get a bunch of suit and tie boardroom type answers. We just give out down-to-earth, tried and true tactics - things we’ve tested ourselves, on client sites, things that we see that are working, and we’re contstantly testing new stuff. It should be a fun and interesting path to go down with us.

David and Brian have very different skill sets. David is strong on the marketing and sales side, Brian is stronger on the programming and development (technical / geeky) side. This means Brian is more of a geek than David. David laughs at that, but Brian says the difference between a geek and a nerd is where the decimal falls on the paycheck, and David has to agree.

Cloaking:

Good / Bad / Both? What is it? Why would you use it? We have some strong opinions on that.

Opinion: We want to do white-hat SEO, since we’re assuming that most people listening are small to medium size businesses trying to learn how to do SEO for themselves so they can get rankings to help their Internet business start making some money. We’re not ever going to suggest that you do anything black-hat that’s going to potentially get you banned from the search engines, so our stance is NO, cloaking is never a good thing.

An explanation of how cloaking works:

Cloaking is also called IP delivery. IP is the Internet Protocol that allows us to communicate and send files and pages online. There are some well published lists that you can purchase of all of the addresses that Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other engines use to crawl your site from. What that would allow you to do is give the search engines one set of content and the users of your site something totally different. The most basic definition of cloaking: giving the spiders something different than your users.

From a technical aspect, it’s not that difficult to do. It’s just not that good of idea to do it, because if you get caught - and the engines are pretty good at catching on - you’re going to get kicked out of the search index, also known as getting banned or nuked. So, is it good, bad or indifferent - most certainly bad. Two thumbs down on this technique and not a good idea to do it.

For those that aren’t understanding what a search engine spider or robot is, that’s part of what we’re going to teach you here in the SEO from the Beginning. There are certain things that you need to do in your code so that when the search engine robots or spiders, which are programs sent out by the engines to collect content on the web, so that they’re able to read that code and understand what it is that you’re talking about on the page. We want to make the source code for your page nice and clean so that the spiders can easily understand the topic of your website and serve up the same page that we’re giving to human visitors to the site.

Listening to Strikepoint with Mikkel and DaveN, who are both known for not exactly playing by the rules in SEO, and Mikkel was saying that it’s absolutely something that any online business, any corporate website especially, does not want to do.

BMW Germany is a perfect example, as they weren’t playing by the rules and Google yanked BMW right out of the search index. It doesn’t look real good when you’re a huge corporation and you can’t be found in Google. People in Germany searching for BMW expect BMW to be #1 in the results, so the fact that someone else was showing up ahead of them already - leaving them to resort to black-hat tactics - really doesn’t look good for them. Their marketing department just needed to get off their backside and get that ranking, because with a brand like BMW, they should be able to rank for their own name.

Exceptions:

There are some times where the search engines seem to ignore the fact that they know that people are cloaking. This is especially true of sites like the NY Times. Clicking on a link from the Google search results to the Times will give you a page without any of the content in the snippet shown on Google. Instead, you just get a log-in page encouraging you to subscribe to read the article. The NY Times is a big enough name that Google isn’t kicking them out of the index, especially since the content is actually there that people want, they just may have to subscribe to see it. Unless you’re the size of the NY Times, which probably isn’t the case since you’re listening to a beginning SEO podcast, you’re probably not going to get away with cloaking. BMW wasn’t big enough, so you and I probably are not big enough either.

The moral of the story: Cloaking = bad. Don’t do it. It really is that simple. If you do things right, you can make a site that’s perfect for visitors that the search engines will like as well.

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