Most people do not think of SEO as a game. Let me take 5 minutes of your time and explain how SEO is simply a game of Chess.

I remember as a teenager learning how to play Chess for the first time. Man it was complicated. Each piece moved different ways. You couldn't take shortcuts and get the game over with. You had to really think about your moves and watch your opponents moves as well. With each move they made, you had to analyze your next move and even the best plans of attack had to be readjusted constantly. The game was always changing depending on who you played against. But once you understood the game, once you understood all the components of the game, you were hooked.

The same goes for SEO.
The First Step to playing the SEO Game is understanding the game.
Read the rules of the game. Understand what is allowed, what is not allowed, and things you must avoid. Research how people will find you. Know what your keyword/keyword phrases are. Who will be coming into your website? Who will you be marketing to?

Google Rules and Guidelines can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Yahoo Guidelines can be found at http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html

MSN Guidelines can be found at http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx

Setting Up Your Chessboard (or website)
Set up your website correctly from the start. Make sure all the pieces of your website are were they belong. For instance, place your Title tags and Meta tags into your headtags. Create clean style web pages from the start. Move your javascripting and css off the page and into their own file so that the search engines can get to what is important right away.

Playing The Game
In Chess, the rook and the bishop do not move the same way on your chessboard. Understand how each piece of the game moves and works and use them to help you win the game.
The same is true for your SEO. For example, many people do not use their head tags correctly. They try to stuff as many keywords as they can think of into the Meta Keywords tag. This will not get you far in the game. Try to be focused in your keywords. Use 3-5 keyword/keyword phrases at most and never use the same word more then 3 times.

Make sure you are using all the pieces of the game. Title tags, Meta Tags, H1 Tags, Content, Links, Relevancy, etc. Some people think when playing chess that the pawns are really of no use. You can lose them, you can keep them, no big deal. The same can be said about Meta Tags. However when playing against Yahoo or MSN, they will take advantage of your pawns. More so then when playing with Google. But why would you not use these pieces in a game? Why would you not take advantage of every single piece and make each one as important as the others. Would you have a better chance of winning if you used each piece of the game instead of only a few?

Know who you are playing against.
The more information your have about your opponent and how they play can greatly increase your chance of beating them. The same can be said about search engines. Understand how they work and how they find sites. Knowing your opponent can help you to win. But also keep in mind that as time moves on, your opponent is getting stronger. They are constantly changing their game to keep up with the new breed of chess players. You may be able to beat them today, but in 6 months, they may have a new strategy. Keep a close eye on them and change your game to adjust to theirs.

Keep in mind that your opponent will never tell you how they are going to play the game. There are secret strategies that only they know. Many will guess as to what those are, but nobody will ever know their strategy 100%.

Do Not Take Shortcuts Just To Get The Game Over With
The same can be said about using spam techniques to get your site listed quickly and to the top. Spam techniques may work for a short time but once you get caught, you are banned from playing the game. Google states this about spam, "Trying to deceive (spam) our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages compromises the quality of our results and degrades the search experience for everyone. We think that's a bad thing."

Basically spamming is a way of cheating the game to win faster. Remember chess is not a quick game. It takes time and patience. No one wants to play with a cheater....NO ONE.

Capturing the King - CHECKMATE
Content is King. Content is the way to win the game. Without capturing the content, you will lose the game. Each of the search engines look for relevancy within your page. If you state that your page is about red dogs with hats, and you have a page written about blue cats with shoes, it does not work. Keep your pages focused. If you are writing about red dogs with hats, write about those red dogs with hats only. If you also have red dogs with boots, then give them their own page and write about them boots separately.

Keep the pages focused and on track. The title tag would be about the red dogs with hats. The meta tag keyword would be about the red dogs with hats. The meta tag description is a nice 250 character description about the red dogs with hats. Use a H1 tag high on the page that has red dogs with hats. You can use css tags to make the h1 tag match your site. Then write clear, focused, original content about the red dogs with hats. Start out with 3 paragraphs and mention the red dog with hats once in each paragraph. Watch your rankings. Add additional content if necessary but do it slowly. Make notes of all the changes that you make. If something does not work, go back and undo it. Keep adding fresh and unique content to your site.
Do not let your site go into stalemate.

Once you look at SEO as simply a game, it makes it that much more exciting to play. And it's even more fun TO WIN!

Shawna Fennell is the owner of 1 Choice 4 YStore. A company dedicated to helping Online Stores. Please visit http://store.1choice4ystore.com/ for free advice and tips on SEO, Marketing, Design, and much more. You can also sign up for daily tips at http://blog.1choice4ystore.com/

The objective of all search engine providers is epitomized by the ideal search often portrayed in the popular television and movie series “Star Trek”. When the captain issues a request for all information on a Klingon spaceship, the search engine intuitively understands that he wants military information. It does not provide information on how much the spaceship costs in the commercial market and where it can be obtained, nor the scientific details that would interest an engineering student.

Search engines are similar to rating agencies like Moody and Standard & Poor’s (S&P). These engines rate web pages similar to the way Moody would rate a company credit rating by giving it a rank. Google’s latest patent application are similar to the methods used by stock charting (technical analysis) – using the same ideas such as Rate-of-Change, Momentum and so forth. It is comparable to Moody apply a patent for some of the methods use for ranking and henceforth, restraining S&P from employing similar algorithms.

The upcoming Sony Playstation 3 will have 1% the processing power of a human brain. Given that most people uses 10% of their brainpower, it is years away, not decades, that machines will have equivalent brainpower.

The respective percentages of all searches done in February 2005 are 36% for Google, 31% for Yahoo, 16% for MSN and the rest shared by the smaller providers. As evident by these numbers, market share can fluctuate significantly over a few months.

Microsoft is numero uno when it comes to desktops and internet browsers although it is facing challenges from Mozilla (internet browsers). Sony (the leader in game consoles), Linux (desktop). Given its large base of customers, this dogged competitor is flexing its muscles against Yahoo and Google. It is foolhardy to write-off Microsoft, given its resilience, market-savvy, financial resources and history of handling challenges from upstarts. MSN spiders are faster in indexing web pages than its two main rivals.

Yahoo is the perennial internet competitor. It has more than 100 million customers and has a presence in every piece of the internet pie. Its search engine revenues rose and it is closing the gap to Google’s dominance.

Some possible dark horses in the race may include Clusty and Accoona. Clusty has some nifty clustering technology that can provide different categories while Accoona has search abilities based on artificial intelligence. Accoona also has a large customer base in China where the internet population is the biggest in the world surpassing that of U.S.

This author’s take:

Despite its pronouncements, Google will need a large customer base to be able to provide “more personalized searches”. Providing 2GB free email is the first step, from which it can harvest a lot of raw data which many privacy advocates are strongly oppose to.

Google’s plan to digitize all the books in the major libraries may lead the company into a legal quagmire of copyright issues involving publishers and authors.

Maybe, the emergence of some “intelligent” browsers with in-built artificial intelligence capabilities which can bypass search engine servers altogether – instead these agents would apply filters or weights according to the wishes of the individual searcher.

Google typifies the successful upstart – self-assured, confident and secretive, causing dismay to analysts and fund managers. During its recent IPO (Initial Public Offering), Google bypassed the traditional route via underwriters and brokers thus denying them a share of the spoils. This slap on the wrist would not go down too well with these lords of the financial world. Should Google face some difficulties or stumbles, this publicly traded company may give new meaning to the expression “When it rains, it pours”.

Expect mergers, takeovers to be the norm. The real leader of the internet would evolve from the diverse parties and it would include the Ebay-Paypal component. We live in interesting times.

Stan Seecrets’ Postulate: “The imminent war for world domination will be fought between the gods of the internet and the gods of finance.”

The author, Stan Seecrets, is a veteran software developer with 25+ years experience at (http://www.seecrets.biz) which specializes in digital asset protection. You can email him with comments and criticism via Stan at Seecrets dot biz.
© Copyright 2005, Stan Seecrets. All rights reserved.