Indianapolis Business Development

Play nice, but by all means put search engine optimization to work for you

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that allows you to draw more viewers to your site.  How do you do that?

Great question.  Unless you've advertised your web address (or have a well-recognized name generally assumed to be your address), most users will find your online presence via search engines.  Google, Dogpile, Ask.com, Yahoo - these are some of the more popular search engines out there that search the web in response to a key word inquiry. 

Let's say you make an awesome carrot cake and have decided to open your own mail-order carrot cake company.  You go to Google and do a simple word search with "carrot."  Expecting maybe to find information about the tastiest varieties or where to buy them, you're surprised to find that Carrot2 Clustering Engine and Carrot Clothing are among Google's top five results.

What have these two companies done to earn such a ranking?  Search engine optimization.  They've managed to design their site to include numerous references to or provide relevant information about the word "carrot."  In these cases the repeated use is obvious, as "carrot" is a part of the company name. 

Reputable sites that tend to have a long-term presence on the web and who intentionally use key text to draw viewers to their site are sometimes referred to as "white hat" SEOs.  Other sites, however, aren't so transparent in their use of key words.

"Black hat" SEOs will try to manipulate their text or their web design by loading up on popular key words, thereby generating more hits on the search engines and luring users to their site.  Some black hat SEO techniques include hiding text by matching the font to the background color, or by building a wide page that doesn't display the text unless you scroll over to see it.  The point of this deception?  To pull more users to your page in the hopes that they'll end up buying whatever it is that you're selling.

One high-profile case of black hat SEO was with German websites for BMW, which in 2006 used a doorway page - a page visible only to search engines, loaded up with key words to generate a higher result - to redirect people searching for used cars to the BMW site.  As a consequence Google banned the site from their listings, and only reinstated them after all the doorway pages were removed.  A steep penalty indeed, given the vast audience that Google commands.

Dirty tricks aside, search engine optimization is a useful and effective tool for increasing traffic to your website.  Keep it honest to avoid harsh consequences, but by all means consider this technique when working on ways to attract more viewers to your site.