Introduction to SEO #1: series introduction

(NOTE: this is part of the “Introduction to SEO” series)

This series’ goal, as the name suggests, is to be a primer to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a term I’ll talk about further in the second part. What will appear here isn’t “rocket science”, and won’t turn anyone into an “SEO guru”, although it can be a good start. There are many sites, blogs, forums and books (I, myself, have read some) out there about this subject, if you want to go further, and I’ll suggest a few of them at the end of the series. But, if you know little to nothing about SEO… you’ve come to the right place.

Why did I decide to write this series? One of the main reasons is the sorry state of SEO in Portugal, my home country, though I doubt it happens just locally. Around here, even the sites of “big” brands or companies are, quite often, designed and created by people who don’t even suspect that it’s possible to optimize sites to be better placed in search engines. The results are often comical: posts in personal blogs appear, in query results, before the companies or brands’ official sites. And I don’t mean ultra-mega-optimized blogs. Simply, because they use software like WordPress, or services like Blogger, their HTML is more valid than the companies’ sites (most Portuguese web designers use software like FrontPage, are completely unaware there’s such a thing as “valid HTML”, or that there are browsers other than Internet Explorer 6), and they have… titles. Yes, some people haven’t discovered the <title> tag yet.

By the way, the series is meant to be read in order. There’s a nice series index, which will be updated as each part is written.

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