In the second last posting I indicated that I think of Searchengineoptimization as a solid craft. This led to some comments and since I want to devote more than just a half sentence to this topic, here a little painting:


the essential base for all webprojects should be a searchenginefriendly implementation. No content hidden in flash, no frames, no session-ids, clean URLs and much more – all of the usual cautions and pointers that can be found anywhere on the Internet in connection to searchengineoptimization. For all intends and purposes I view this area as something that can be easily implemented by a slightly trained web-designer/developer during the construction of the website – sadly the reality often looks different. It is even more astonishing since the intersections between searchenginefriendliness and a barrier-free implementation are extremely large. This step is usually enough for many projects to reach the wanted visibility in the SERPs.

Only when these solid foundations are set up properly, can you go into areas that deserve the label “searchengineoptimization”: how can the internal and external linkstructure be improved, is there a possibility for duplicate-content-problems, are relevant keywords sufficiently researched and covered within the project as well as many other questions which need to be resolved and implemented. Once all of these are resolved satisfactorily, your project will be more preferable than 95% of the Internet, at least as far as the searchengines are concerned. In nearly all cases, these two steps should be all that are needed to reach your goals.

Are you selling private health insurance paired with credits? This would presumably mean that your cause is considerably more difficult in which case you will need the little triangle on top of the diagram. Sadly, in this case, it will take an enormous effort to get those last few percents, which you are still missing but which will, at least for those topics, make the difference between you being found on page one or page 112. This is where the real expert knowledge, which is often asked for first in forums – before all of the other steps – is needed: longstanding experience, much work, intuition and often even a little luck. This is the part of SEO which can surely not be considered as craft anymore ;-)