Compare SEO process to programming, White Hat Black Hat, and Google Algorithms

First E-Webstyle.com SEO Podcast Nov. 28 th 2008.  Third page of Transcription compare SEO process to programming, White Hat, Black Hat and Google algorithms.

Chris: That’s what I’m going to do. Yesterday… You’re already there, as soon as you walked in the door, miraculously your website was on page one. Again, that’s the goal, and there a lot of ways to achieve that goal. It is a time consuming process. It’s not an incredibly challenging process, and what I mean by that is that it’s not rocket science. You know, Google, and with all the information out available on the internet, you’re actually able to piece together what it takes to get your website onto page one of Google. For all of those out there who are listening who own their own website and really don’t have a budget that they can allocate towards search engine optimization, and are going to do this themselves, believe me, you can do it. It’s time consuming. I come from a programming background, and one of the beauties of programming is you do something, you change a line of code, you test it, and it works immediately, which is usually how it works for me.

Paul: Always

Chris: Or it fails, and you try again, and you make another change to the code, and you’ve got this immediate sense of gratification. Search Engine Optimization is not something that gives you that immediate sense of gratification. In fact I postponed the company moving into the direction of providing Search Engine Optimization, because it wasn’t something that appealed to my sense of immediate gratification. Probably making me sound a little needy or something. The guy is only focused on immediate gratification. At the end of the day, we’re focused on what’s best for the customer. I always got people asking “Hey, where can I get Search Engine Optimization.” I knew the processes; I was doing them for some of my own pet projects, and ultimately decided it was too important to our clients to no longer provide that service. So…. We just started providing that. So, given all of that, what is involved in SEO? And, again, what is involved in SEO, is understanding, as best we can, the things that Google takes into consideration – again, we’re talking about Google, but this can apply to MSN and Yahoo! – the things that Google takes into consideration when determining who shows up on the front page. Now, if we had access to Google’s code, this would be really easy.

Paul: Yeah, that would be awesome.

Chris: Because we would just set it up on our desktop, this is where my instant gratification would love it, we set it on our desktop, we change the results, we change what’s on the website, we see how Google’s software, how it’s code interacts with that, and it displays it immediately. We make those changes, we know how it works, boom, that’s done. Unfortunately, we do not have access to Google’s code. Of course Google keeps that very closely held, but they do give a lot of ….

Chris: insights into the fundamentals of what they are looking for. And in reality, Google has a constant struggle. Really, all they are trying to do is give you great search results, so there are constant tweaks to the algorithms which we’ll talk about because they are constantly tweaking the algorithm. Those constant tweaks to the algorithm, they’re constantly doing that to try and optimize and make sure they’re showing the best results. And then there are us out there who are legitimate, what are called White Hat Search Engine Optimizations. The White Hat just means you’re doing it the right way. There’s a term called Black Hat, which means you’re actually doing it the wrong way. So, there’s White Hat SEO guys, like us. There’s Black Hat SEO guys who are out there trying to figure out how they can get sometimes an unrelated web site to the top first page, or the top position on an unrelated term, and they do that cause they want lots of traffic because somehow they are generating revenue from lot of traffic.

Paul: Can that work? Black Hat?

Chris: Well, Black Hat can work. And in fact, you want to be leery if you’re out there… doing, if you’re out there searching for Search Engine Optimization Services for your company, you want to be really careful, because anyone who is using Black Hat techniques, they may get you to the top of Google.

Paul: But?

Chris: And there’s a big but here…. But if they get caught, and when I say they, what I really mean is if your website gets caught, you could potentially be banned by Google. So you clearly, and let me state this again, you do not want to work with someone who uses Black Hat techniques, because eventually you will get caught, and eventually you will be banned or relegated to the bottom 10,000 or end of the search results, if your SEO guy is using Black Hat techniques, or you are using Black Hat Techniques on your website. Was that easy to say?

Paul: And I think it would even be good for you to ask, if you even decide to outsource your SEO to a professional company, I would ask, hey, what type of techniques do you use? Are you using White Hat techniques? I mean one, it makes you sound more educated, like you know exactly what you’re doing, and you want to know that kind of stuff, because if they’re using Black Hat Techniques, you could get banned, and that’s the end of it for you.Paul: And the Yellow Pages, some people do the Yellow Pages. Chris: And that’s it. That’s the… Well, you’re familiar with the Yellow…

Chris: Yeah then…then your options are very limited. Your…in fact your — really your only option is to, you can make appeals to Google, uh, Google may give you another chance, that’s just not, just not a situation you want to put yourself in. Um. Because the other option is that you start over with a new domain and you really don’t want to do that either, that’s just not, just don’t do it. All right? We covered Black Hat. (crosstalk). So we got White Hat, yes? Black Hat: no. All right. We got that out of the way. So, um, so the reason we got talking about White Hat and Black Hat is because Google is constantly changing their algorithm because they don’t want Black – they don’t even want Black Hat techniques to work, um, and they’re again, just trying to optimize their results. They’re also doing other things like, um, as they’ve kind of brought products online like (phone rings)–

Paul: Like that guy calling (haha)

Chris: Huh it’s late um (phone rings). I don’t even know how to make that go away.

Paul: (ha) Sorry! (laughter)

Chris: This is a real business, we work all the time and —

Paul: 24 hours a day —

Chris: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Paul: It’s 8 o’clock. (laughter)

Chris: That’s crazy. Ah that’s all right. Anyway so welcome to E-Webstyle, the way we do business. It is- and by the way, we don’t just ignore customer phone calls, It’s 8 o’clock on a Friday; we’re in the middle of this podcast, and um, and, and apparently–

Paul: We’ll call you back. (laughter)

Paul: We’ll call you back at 9 when we’re finished.

Chris: Um. So. So Google’s constantly adjusting it, they come out with different products every now and then. One of them is, uh, Google Local, it’s, uh, a fairly recent addition, and so they’ll end up tweaking their codes to accommodate the, the new products that they’re coming out, the new targets that they may be doing and as they make those changes, that actually affects the results, and when it affects the results, it actually affects what we have to do. That’s why the service that we sell is actually a monthly service, um, so we’re constantly monitoring those algorithms, monitoring the effects that those algorithms have on websites, and when those, when those things do happen, uh, we’re, we’re already taking care of um, of monitoring it and making the appropriate changes to your websites, to the inbound links, to everything that we do. Oh – I mentioned ‘inbound links,’ didn’t I?

Paul: Inbound – what is an inbound link?

Chris: Well I think I – I finally mentioned one thing, which was an answer to your question! (laughter)

Paul: Well, it’s a start! (laughter)

Chris: Um, some of the things, and we’re going to cover this real quickly, we’re going to keep our blog at, um, at thirty minutes, each time, not blog, our podcast, at 30 minutes each time, so we’ll, we will definitely be covering each of these probably in significant detail, probably in ad nausuem detail, probably more than you really want to know unless you’re actually doing the SEO on your own website or you are an SEO provider.

Chris: Just to cover some of them that we do with Google. We do link building. We work on Meta Tags. Meta Tags are little hidden tags. Actually if you go to a website and you right-click on the website–this is at least how you do it in IE–and you click View Source…

Paul: Wait, wait, wait. What’s IE?

Chris: Oh, yeah.

Paul: Yeah, what’s IE?

Chris: It almost got away from me, there. I was moving fast. IE is Internet Explorer. So on a typical XP is the most prevalent operating system right now and/or Vista–the new version–on both of those, the default web browser is IE. So if you’re looking at a website in IE and you right-click anywhere where there’s text on the website, you’ll get a pop-up menu. And if you’ll click View Source, you should see the source code. That’s the actual HTML code for that web page. When you’re viewing that, you can actually see Meta Tags. And Meta Tags are Meta descriptions, there’s Meta keywords. Those are some of the things that search engines utilize and that we work with on your site. We actually also do site maps. This is a concentrated file that has specific, let’s just call it short cuts to each of the pages on your website.