Verecom Web Design Blog

One of the web entrepreneurs shared his e-business experience as follow:

In the past when I was building the website, I did not put any idea of SEO into practice. Until one day I found that my website always ranked top on a lot of popular technology keywords searching page and some professional SEO companies started to discuss about the keywords advertisement with me. Hence I realized the strength of my website in this aspect. This made me start to think back how this website was built up at the first place.

We can use the relationship between teachers and students to explain the idea of SEO. Let us say a newly launched website is like a primary school first year student, what should he do to be a good student in the eyes of the teacher (search engine)?

Generally, teachers expect the students can grow healthily and study hard. In stead of just focusing on doing their own study well in the class, teachers also wish students develop good social relationship and some good characters, like cooperation and unity during the study.

Mr. Search Engine is a teacher who has great concern on his students’ social relationship; he doesn’t want students just concentrate on their own study without paying any attention to his questions or talking to the other students after class. He wishes the students can interact with the others, for example, giving a hand to Tom in Math homework and receiving help from John in Painting class as well. If you can have more interaction with the other students, even with many teachers, then in the eyes of Mr. Search Engine, surely you are good student who is active, open and easy-going.

Of course, if this student just plays with the others all day long, still he will be a “problem” student in the end. Study performance is still a very important part in students’ school assessment. At the same time, Mr. Search Engine is also a teacher who is very good at guiding the students develop their strength according to their own interest. If a student who really loves dodge ball and talk about dodge ball in all his homework. Then the teacher will write “best dodge ball player” in his school assessment.

Therefore we can summarize what kind of students (websites) your teacher, Mr. Search Engine like most:

1. Have good interaction with the other students (outbound links from other websites),

2. Have great passion on develop their own interest and always have new discoveries (unique information and creativity on website).

3. Last but not the least, never try to achieve everything in one day but grow up step by step (WebPages quantity).

Generally, search engine need to put the good website in the front to bring convenience to the users. In the example we just mentioned above, teachers build up their reputation by finding and rising up many good students, and students also receive more attentions because of the high rank teachers give to them. These two parties can promote each other for mutual benefit.

However, some students, although their performances are good, they don’t understand how their teacher’s make the assessment; in the end they missed the chance to be recognized as good students. Therefore, we can understand SEO in this way, the aim of SEO is to help students (websites) understand the assessment standard of the teacher (search engine). In order to evaluate billions of billions students, teachers need certain standards to evaluate the students systematically. In other words, even the students are good, but if they can not do their homework following the standards of the teacher, they might miss the chance to be recognized as good students (get high rank).

Two standards for Search engine evaluation

Then what are the standards of Mr. Search Engine to evaluate all the students? Mainly there are two:

1. Whether the quality and quantity of the research information the students provide are outstanding.

2. Whether the students can receive the agreements from the others in the research he released and they are willing to promote it for him.

The first point is about the information of the website, the quality of the information has to been good, and quantity has to be great as well. We can call it keyword index.

The second point means how many other websites, blogs, etc, have linked with this website. We can call it page rank index.

Time these two indexes (keyword and page rank), if the result your website gets is higher than the others and your teacher recognized that there is no violation, then in the most situations you will get the approval from the teacher to put your website in the front.

In conclusion, if your website wants to win the favours of search engines, then there are four things you have to know:

1. The rule of the keyword index

2. The rule of page rank

3. The methods which search engine might see as cheating

4. The score of the other websites.

Simply say, if the score (keyword index times page rank) you get can be ranked as first thirty among all the competitors, that means you have high possibility to be listed on the first three search pages. But there is one premise, no violation (cheating). If the violation has been found, your might receive punishment according to the situation. In the worst case, search engine might put your website into the blacklist and reject it to be listed in website rank.

Edited By Vicky Yin

If the goal of building up a website is to let more people like to keep using it after first try, then first of all, you need originality for your website. The originality can from an assembly of bookmarks, a combination of the pictures or certain scheme of the website, for example, an online stray dogs care community. I cannot tell you how to make these ideas, because this is the most precious treasure of the website makers, and it is the original point of everything.

After you have ideas, then you need to set up the website itself. I really wish the e-business entrepreneur see building a website as building a house in this stage. For both, the foundation has to set up properly. Therefore you really need some knowledge of web structure. In order to set up foundation properly you have to consider that which platform you will use to develop the product; whether there will be any difficulties for you to add new items based on the current service you provide in the future; whether there will be any troubles of system efficiency when the website is enlarged in size later.

All these problems will not emerge in the early stage of website construction. But you will find it is really hard to come back to solve all these problems after your website has developed in certain scale. This is one of the reasons why many articles about e-business emphasized on the important of having good technology development team at the first place. You also have to know that a good programmer is not always a good system planner. If you can have one or two people who have talent in system planner in your initial web development team then it will be really helpful for you to build up your website on a good foundation in the future.

One thing I have to mention that no one can predict whether the website will have great traffics at very beginning. You might feel annoying if the web technicians keep telling you how important it is to set up a good foundation at beginning. In this case, you have to understand that what they concern about is related to the three elements of web structure. They are “design”, “usability” and “Search Engine Optimization - SEO”.

To set up a commercial website is not something easy, good web skills and three elements actually are different things. Normally designer will in charge of the design part to make the page looks attractive; on the other hand, usability is to reduce the level of difficulty for the users in using this website. However in the eye of the designers, design and usability always conflict with each other. Therefore, balance these three elements is already a very difficult job in planning a commercial website, which expects to gain the profits in the future.

But actually the most difficult part for the website structure is SEO (Searching Engine Optimization). These three letters can mean many things to e-business, some people view this as cheating, like playing some tricks with the search engine while some people think this is just trivial things that all the developers can do. Some people can not bear the changes of the web page after the work of SEO; designers always complained about why they can not use Flash here or there because website with lots of Flash is hard to get optimised.

Then what on earth does SEO really mean? Before we doubt the validity of SEO, we should first understand SEO from the view point of the search engines.

If you are Yahoo or Google, what kind of websites you want to put into the front?

When the online users are using a search engine, if the searching results on this search engine provided can not direct them to find the information they want quickly; instead, they have to check page by page; then surely they will feel this search engine is not convenient and they may consider to choose another one. Therefore in order to enhance their competitive strength, search engines need to precisely rank many good websites, and provide more convenience to the users to find the information more quickly.

For this reason, search engines need good websites as well. If a search engine can not find good websites and give them suitable rank, then it will be very difficult for this search engine to be accepted by the users. The web designer with good SEO skills will enrich the information in website and let the search engine consider this website as a good website; then naturally this website will get a good rank. To evaluate whether it is a good website, search engines have developed a serial of program to rate the websites.

Some of the standards search engines have made are open, the search engine even provide assistant tools (like Webmaster Tool which Yahoo released recently) to help the websites improve themselves following this standards. Why they do in this way? Suppose search engine is using one kind of language follow the standards and rules they have made, for example, English. If the website designer doesn’t know English but only speak French while the search engines only accept English, then the search engines will have difficulties to estimate whether this is a good website and there will be a great confusion for the search engine. Therefore in order to have a good rank, website makers have to know what search engines want and what they don’t want and they have to help search engines to know their website well. This is why SEO is not a trick or cheating, on the contrary, SEO not only help the website boost their traffics through the search engines but also promote the search engine to the users through introducing good websites by their rank.

As we know, marketing expense occupies the biggest part of cost in operating the website. But if the websites can improve their traffic through SEO, it will not just greatly reduce the expense on advertisement but greatly increase the survival rate of the websites as well. Although SEO may cause some impacts on design and usability, if the website maker can plan it well, it is not a difficult job to minimize the side effects SEO brings. The reward of this effort is pretty high and surely the search engine will consider your website as a good website even more.

Summary : If you don’t want to deal with the search engine, then surely the search engines won’t be happy to be “friend” with you as well, they won’t put you on the tops of their friend list (ranking). For example, if the search engines say very clearly that they don’t like Flash of course it doesn’t mean you can not use flash at all, unless you want to make the whole page as Flash but you just follow your own favouritism and ignore the feeling of search engine, then later on, you should not complain about why search engines are not “friendly” to you.

Edited By Vicky Yin