Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the name for the practice of building and maintaining your presence within search engines. Search engines use different rules and read different attributes of web pages in order to build their search results, and it's important to represent the content in your site accurately and clearly. It is also critical to build relationships with other websites, earning links from other sites to your site, and reciprocating with links out to other sites like yours. This cross-linking forms a major aspect of page ranking for search results.
At the base level, SEO is really about doing two things right: 1) Building your site correctly; 2) Creating content users want. This sounds both simple and difficult. And it is.
Adhering to best practices and standards when building your site should insure that your content is visible and understandable to search engines as they crawl the web. Making sure to use proper markup in content, to keep meaningful text out of images, and taking care of proper meta tags should keep a site in good shape for getting properly indexed on Google. But correct code does not equal popular content.
Generating excellent content is the most important part of improving your search engine ranking. If users find your content useful or compelling and link to it, then that is the most valuable form of promotion you can earn. Search engines and web users hate artificial or disingenuous promotion, so be sure to gain organic linking from other sites by making a good reputation for your site and publishing good content.
However, it can be difficult to get everything just right, and, in fact, it turns out that a bit of knowledge goes a long way. Although you can get sites that will get indexed and be properly represented in search engines by just following the rules of good web development, you can get quicker and somewhat better results if you put some effort into making sure you're getting listed the way you want.
Some of the tips in the required viewings and additional resources below can help you promote a new site most effectively. Keep in mind that when it comes to SEO, there are many competing views. Wikipedia includes a section called "White hat versus black hat techniques" on its Search Engine Optimization page, addressing the darker side of SEO.
Other side effects of both SEO and content optimization is the rise of forms that sometimes do not match with our cultural values. For example, there has been a rise of "listicles" -- articles which are primarily composed of a list of items. These listicles have been very popular on websites because they provide a way for users to quickly glean a lot of information. They are easily produced, can be created collaboratively, and they provide ample opportunity to mention lots of keywords. In many ways, they are ideal fodder for the web.
But some sites choose to present their listicles with each list item on a separate page. So a list of 25 items becomes 25 pages, which then bring in 25 times as many ad views. The sites who employ this strategy tend to be awash in advertisements so that the required constant clicking "next" is made even worse by slow loading ads that block the content the user seeks. This is generally considered unethical use of listicles, and terrible user experience.
As with so many of these tools at the disposal of modern web developers, the ethical and reasonable terrain must be discovered and negotiated. It's important to think about the user's experience and to keep in mind the developer's obligation to the user as a way to govern the lengths to which we'll go seeking customers and promotion.