Gadgetory

back in the day if you wanted to get noticed it meant renting a billboard taking out an ad in a newspaper or failing that just standing on a soapbox in the park and pontificating but now with large search engines being the go-to fonts of information for most of us to make themselves heard people companies and other organizations have been seeking ways to fight and claw to the top of search results using a process called search engine optimization or SEO but what is that well you see giant search engines like Google use algorithms to try to push relevant results to the top of the page so that when a user types in computer mouse they'll get links to buy a new input device rather than pictures of Stewart little trying to use a PC now how exactly these algorithms work are usually closely guarded trade secrets but there's enough public knowledge for webmasters to attempt to tune their pages to boost their position in the search results in fact Google even puts out a search engine optimization starter guide to help website owners improve their chances of earning the coveted top result so then for starters it's a good idea to optimize your pages metadata metadata is all the stuff other than the actual content people will see in their browser window and accurate metadata things like descriptive page titles or embedding a short explanation of what's on the page into your HTML which you can often end up seeing underneath the Google result can help push your site up to the top a more recent development is making URLs themselves more informative you've probably seen this on news sites which have started to use file names that indicate what the article is about like tasteless youtuber where socks and sandals dot HTML which is a lot more helpful to a search engine than just assigning some random number another pro tip is to nest your pages in some sort of sensible directory structure organized by things like topics and dates but what about the page itself well since most modern search engines use how often a page is linked to as a key metric of its importance providing descriptive text links in the body of a webpage to other pages on your site can be very helpful and search engines are also aware of things like topic headers and alt text for images to help categorize the site the key as with any metadata is to keep these as short but also as informative and descriptive as possible to make it easier for a search engine to determine that your site is relevant to a particular topic of course though everything we've outlined so far is a legitimate SEO strategy there are plenty of other tricks that might be employed by unscrupulous site owners these collectively are known as blackhat SEO or spam dexing and their goal is to try to make the page seem more relevant to a topic than it actually is and these tricks can take the form of anything from citing keywords in invisible text that a user would have to highlight to see to buying link backs or even traffic from other sites for using irrelevant keywords that might just be trending at the moment or even just overusing the relevant ones this kind of behavior has resulted in a bit of a digital arms race between search engine developers who are trying to weed out these pages for their users and spammers or site owners who are desperate for clicks and aren't above using shady tactics so who will ultimately win well let me put it this way as search giants like Google deploy more sophisticated methods to separate the signal from the noise my advice is if you want your website to be around for a long time stick to the honest tried-and-true tactics even if your website does feature material of ill repute speaking of SEO tricks if that's just yet another thing that you don't want to deal with when you want to build your own website Squarespace actually does a lot of this stuff automatically Squarespace is the way to go if you want to build a simple powerful beautiful website it's easy to use you just you know click here and go okay I want a picture there you type up your text the whole thing has got a cloud interface that is really clean and if you have trouble with it they've got 24/7 support via live chat and email it's just 12 bucks a month and every Squarespace site features responsive design so your website scales to look great on any device features commerce so you've got a free online store and you can even publish oh wow no hold on here's a new feature new currencies for commerce you can accept payments from Mexico Russia Hong Kong Thailand New Zealand and more flippin awesome so start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today and when you sign up for Squarespace for real use offer code 10 10% off your first purchase so thanks for watching guys like dislike leave a comment subscribe and uh ah damn it I'm sure I'm missing something but you know the drill anyway