Saw Craig Hordlow speak on Search Engine Optimization, (SEO). Normally this isn’t my bag, I always thought SEO was a polite way to say, “cheat the search engines.” It sounds sketchy.

Craig, however, is definitely not sketchy. He’s very pragmatic and I got a couple of neat nuggets.

The most pragmatic, and thus my favorite, was that search rank doesn’t matter if users don’t stick around on your site. So whatever you do to fool the search engines, don’t let it get in the way of creating a site that your lucky visitors will want to read.

He also talked a little bit about Page Rank. I’d heard of it, but I didn’t know it was something that the search engines shared with you. Here’s a tool to check your page rank.

He couldn’t help but share one cheat. Search engines add extra weight to terms at the top of the page. From the SEO perspective you’d do well by putting a lot of your search terms at the top of the page. That’s probably not going to do a lot of good for your visitors. However, you can use CSS to style your page so that the block of keywords at the top of your HTML file actually displays at the bottom. Tricky!

Craig runs an SEO consultancy, Red Bricks Media, and also teachs SEO at AcademyX.