LT7_Act3

• What is the most simplistic way of describing search engine optimization to a person who has never heard of it before?
Search Engine Optimization is make your website easy for people to find when they search sites like Google.
• Would the SEO goals and techniques of a small business website owner be different or similar to an educator with a website or a student-generated website?
As an educator, I do not want my site to be easily found by any Google or Yahoo search. My website is for my students and their families only, not for the general public. A small business website is one that could truly benefit from SEO to get people more familiar with their product or service.
• At what point in the web design is it best to learn about SEO? Why?
I think it would have been more beneficial to learn about this before creating the website. If I know exactly what the search engines will be looking for, I can keep that in mind when I create my title, description and meta-tag. If I do it after, I have to go back ad fix everything.
• What are the best SEO techniques? What are the worst or most unethical methods (black hat) sometimes used to achieve search engine optimization? Are there consequences for trying to “trick the system”?
Two techniques that I found to be especially unethical are having hidden text and cloaking. Adding hidden text to your site is putting text on a background that is the same color as the text. Your viewers do not see it, but the search engines read it. Cloaking is making a fake page for search engines to read and when you viewer clicks on the link for your site, they get redirected to an actual site. Both of these techniques sound like good old fashioned cheating. These cheating techniques will work for a short time, but once the search engine catches onto what you are doing, they will no longer carry your site in their index. Cheaters usually get caught.