Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is something I know very little about. This is a shame, because I’ve been maintaining this website, or previous incarnations of it, since about 1995 when I first got Internet access, yet almost no one has heard of it. Apparently.
I was at university then, and AltaVista was the best search engine. Google didn’t exist, and some of us would still use gopher, or archie, or veronica, or just manual ftp listings (in ASCII) to find information. The web was new, Netscape had just arrived on the scene, and we were all just learning to put up bad pages with image backgrounds and ‘under construction’ images everywhere. People used the <marquee/> and <blink/> tags. I hated the term ‘weblog’, because web logs were Apache’s log files.
Since then, the web has evolved into something far better than those humble days. I never imagined you’d be watching video in your web browser, or that AJAX would happen. I got used to calling things ‘blogs’. I actually was the webmaster for a couple of companies, back when you used to get called that, but now I’m so far behind the state of the art that I hardly know where to start.
But start I must. I have websites that I want people to visit. I have stories to tell, information to share, and yes, even products to buy. So, where to begin?
I’m going to start right here. This blog is my own little place on the web, my voice. It’s dear to my heart, so what better place to begin? And as I do, I’m going to share what I learn with you. If you, like me, are new to the business of getting people to notice you on the web, maybe you’ll find it useful. Maybe you’ll have a tip of your own to share.
Here’s my first tip: write something every day. Search engines and people alike just love new content. So keep it coming.