SEO Ladder

Welcome to SEO Ladder - a step by step account of my quest to learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Background:

My name is Chris Gray and I am you’re typical everyday IT professional. I spend between nine and eleven hours a day developing web applications for a systems company in the United States. I have always been intrigued by computers and am always looking to learn something new.

About a year ago my brother-in-law asked me to design and build a simple front-end for his new startup. I am always up for a new project so I gladly accepted. During the process of building his website he asked me if I was going “optimize the site for search engines”. Without giving it a second thought I said “yeah, that should be no problem at all”. Aside from developing countless “corporate” intranet sites (that never saw the light of day outside of the corporate firewall), I had also created many (well make that four) personal websites over the last 10 years…how hard could it be?

Drawing from my 1999 search engine optimization toolbox I decided to go with a few of the old tried and true methods of getting ranked. First I would “borrow” a few Meta tags from a similar top ranking site, pack the footer with a bunch of good keywords (the same color as the background), and then submit his URL to a few of the biggies (i.e. Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, etc.). Hell, I could even use a search engine submission tool and submit the site to 100 search engines at once.

After waiting about six months his site still was not present in Google’s index. “How could this be…it always worked before?” So I headed back to Google to find out what was wrong.

This is when I first began to read about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I believe I ran across an article from bigoak on “Why has Google banned my website?” It turns out that a lot has changed since 1999 After reading a few articles I was hooked. Well, here I am…

What this blog attempts to do:

This blog chronicles my journey to learn SEO. I plan to use this blog (and a few other sites that I maintain) as my testing ground. I am starting from the very beginning - I will take you through my every mistake, blunder, and hopefully triumph.

The Rules:

I will make every effort to play by the rules (white/gray hat only…no black hat techniques here — well at least not on purpose).

Drop me a line:

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions/comments.

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