Search Engine Optimization - Some observations and Lessons Learned

Promoting a website through words of mouth, mass e-mails, social networks, and chat boxes can only do so much to bring traffic. But if the website ranks very high in search engines, there is no doubt the website will have the most number of visitors. Hence, a website owner needs to be careful and will have to perform many tasks called search engine optimization (SEO) to achieve that higher rank.

In my experience at http://www.geotayo.com, it took me several months to learn the ropes. I launched the website without any knowledge on the importance and techniques of SEO. As a result, the website languished at the bottom of Google search. Some pages even ranked at #250. But after tweaking some codes and changing the titles and description of each page,  the website now have hundreds of pages in the top ten or top 20 depending on the search term and traffic has increased many times over.

The most important lesson I learned here is that care must thoroughly be given to the title. The title must reflect or at least approximate what a searcher would type in the search box. For example, I did not start the title of this post with the words observation because I have the assumption that anyone who would search for SEO will definitely not start or even use the word observation. (Actually, the title of this post should only be Search Engine Optimization. I just added the "Some Observation" for discussion purposes.)

Of course having a good title alone will not suffice for a web page to rank high. There are other and more important factors involved in the algorithm such as a link from a well-visited or authoritative site like Wikipedia.org.  But using a good title is a good start.

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I decided to post this topic because I noticed that there are some bloggers who make the habit of linking their site in guest books via google search. I am not sure of their purpose but I could assume that they want to show that their site is ranking high or that, by doing so, they will improve their ranking. Are there other reasons.

For the first purpose, i.e. to show-off their ranking, I think there is nothing to be proud of here because the term or words they used in the search box is unique so by default, they rank #1 even if they did not do any SEO task.As an example, if you the only website owner using "love123" and you search this in google, I am sure you will rank number 1. But who else in the world would search this?

I am interested in the second purpose, i.e. improving the website rank. Does it really improve one's website if by presenting the search page and showing it's number one rank and more visitors click on it, the website will have a higher rank regardless of the search term being used? At the moment I doubt very much but I am not sure.

For me, it would only give the visitor an additional task which does not help in anything. It might even annoy the visitor especially during times when loading a page is taking a slow motion.