What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the name given to the process of making a website achieve high ranking in search engine queries. The most popular search engine by a long margin (60% of all searches worldwide) is Google, and so most effort is put towards optimizing for that website.
How to implement it
SEO is founded on good web design that consists of accessible and efficient code. Words or phases should be researched using online keyword popularity tools such as Overture and WordTracker to determine which keywords should be used in the text of your website. The ideal scenario is to find a keyword or phrase, or set of keywords or phrases that are frequently searched for, but are not found on many websites. Obviously, very popular searches will have many websites focussed on these keywords.
However, SEO is not only limited to keywords. Perhaps even more important is the PageRank factor. PageRank is a Google-created attribute that reflects a page's importance: the higher the PageRank (out of 10), the greater authority and importance your website has, and normally, this is reflected in your ranking on search engines. How PageRank is determined is a closely guarded secret (by Google), but it an important factor is the number of links from other websites to yours. The greater the number of links from high PageRanked websites, the higher your PageRank will be, and the better you will rank in searches.
The Long Tail
A Long Tail when applied to SEO is a term used to describe niche areas that in total receive greater interest or traffic than mainstream areas. For example, "books" is a very popular search term, whereas "antique art books" is much less popular. However, if you can optimize your website for those search terms, although you will not have as many people searching for the term, you are much more likely to be one of the top results returned. Furthermore, and most importantly, the people that have found your website are much more likely to be interested in your content, than if they were just searching for books. The Long Tail effect enables smaller specialist websites to survive and thrive, and it is important to consider when choosing your keywords.
When should you do SEO?
It is best to start SEO before you write the content of the website. This way you can ensure the keywords you have targeted are well incorporated into your text, in prominent positions, such as page titles, near the top of your page content, in headers, and emphasized in bold or in italics. However, if your website has already been made without considering SEO, you can still go back and make editions to the website content and design if necessary.
What you should not do
With the growing importance of search engines on the Internet as a method of finding information, SEO has become big business. There are now thousands of specialized businesses offering SEO alone, many making bold promises such as a guarantee of a top 10 rank in Google. Approach such offers with care, as you may be paying for a top 10 rank in a search phrase that receives no traffic at all!
You must also be exceptionally careful not to try and trick search engines. There are a huge number of dirty tricks that can be done to try and increase your ranking on searches, such as websites filled with thousands of links linking to yours. It is possible that such schemes may bring you temporary success, but it is almost guaranteed that your trickery will be found out, and then you can expect to be stripped of your rank, and possibly banned for good from the search engines. This is a risk that will not pay off.
Best practice
While SEO is essential to consider when trying to get a top-ranking site, if you have a website filled with quality content, and you are able to promote it so that other websites link to it, this is arguably the most important strategy you can employ. Although assorted SEO strategies and fads come and go, if you are producing good quality text that is useful, you are already giving your website a headstart. "Content is King" is the catchphrase coined to illustrate the importance of this.
Ben Coleman is the CEO and owner of Real Free Websites. He has been designing websites and working on website technologies since 1999. Real Free Websites was created to fill a niche: to offer free or low-cost customized websites and top quality hosting.
We all understand that every owner of a website wants to build traffic. When it comes to building traffic it can be done in any number of ways. The most used and basic of the methods for building traffic is by building links pointing to your website.
These links are the invaluable votes that lead traffic to your website. The traffic generated from these backlinks are where you receive the quality, targeted visitors. There are many programs and scripts available that will promise you 10,000 hits per day or more. The only way scripts such as these will do you any good are if you are getting paid per hit. To build quality and targeted traffic to your site you need to build it steadily and do this by attracting the visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.
The backlinks you need can be generated using several techniques. Submitting your website to quality web directories is a good way for generating relevant links to your site to increase traffic. Another way it by writing and submitting articles to article directories. By placing a link back to your website in the resource box this can build backlinks. Occasionally someone will scan an article directory looking for information and click on the link back to your website to find out more about the topic or the author. If your article gets used by other websites or ezines you will begin to see traffic increase.
There is an additional way that can be effective for building traffic to your site and that is by posting in forums related to your niche. Make use of the signature line in your forum posts to include a link back to your site. Forum members will read quality posts and readily click the signature links back to your site to see if there is additional information there. Forums do provide a platform for building relevant traffic to your site.
It is also possible to build traffic using link and banner exchanges. When you put a link to their site they will reciprocate by placing a link back to yours. With sites that are relevant to each other's niche you will be sending targeted traffic back and forth.
There are also ways to promote your business offline such as business cards with the name of your business, logo and a web address. These offline marketing tools can lead people to your site to see what it has to offer. Perhaps an ad in a magazine or newspaper could be a way of generating interest in your website.
There are affiliate programs that can also assist you in generating traffic to your website. By using affiliate resources such as Clickbank you can get others to promote your site, the products and services it offers to drive additional traffic and prospects to your website.
Backlinks to your website is the most effective way of generating traffic. It brings in visitors that are interested in what your website has to offer. That means when they arrive on site they will be more inclined to use your services or purchase your products. Those are the ideal visitors to have.
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Website optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Website optimization, better known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), adheres to the basic principle of giving content-based relevance to a website among the pool of websites.
Optimizing a website involves a series of processes by which the website acquires proper indexing in the database of the search engines, and thus gets ranked to the topmost position in the SERP.
Meta Tags are one of the methods used in optimizing the web page. Though not common nowadays in many of the search engines, Meta Tags still are used in the search process by certain search engines. Meta Tags are mainly used to display the brief description of a web page after the search result. Proper use of Meta Tags, thus will improve the optimization of the website.
The keyword as well as the content of the website is of prime importance to the optimization of the website. Each page should have at least 200 words with at least 4-5 repetitions of the keywords in it in proper logical order. The keyword density (number of keywords/word count) has to be in compliance with the search engine criteria. Illogical repetitions of the keywords, thus, will have a negative impact on the optimization. It is better to include one keyword in one paragraph, following the logical sequence of the matter.
Hyperlinks can improve the performance of the website. Having more relevant text links in a website enables the search engines to tag them according to the text contained in the links. It is therefore important to include the text links that have used the keywords in the link title and the related description.
Connected links enhance the page ranking. There are various partner programs available to direct other website to yours. If your website is identified as the best redirected website, it improves the page ranking of your website. If the directing websites are popular, there are more chances to improve your page ranking. However, make sure that you adhere to the search engine criteria for the same. For example, if all links from a number of websites are directing to a single page of your website, irrespective of the inappropriate content in the page, it will be assumed as ’spam’ and ignored by the search engine.
There are certain contents that are hostile to the search engine crawlers. These include the JavaScript navigators, Flash images, Forms, and Dynamic URLs. The search engines do not identify JavaScript and Flash navigations. Therefore pages that contain these features should not be given for optimization. However, in inevitable situations, you may use them by adding appropriate Meta Tags and text contents.
Pages containing Dynamic URLs and Forms face the same problems. A form page or a dynamic page, is therefore, not recommended for website optimization. However, the problem with the frames can be solved to an extent by including a ‘no-frame’ section in the frameset. Try to include the Meta Tags and maximum number of hyperlinks that will help the page to get indexed even in the presence of a form in it.
Though it is difficult to get an excellent rank in the Search Engines, you may achieve a decent result by following these thumb rules.
Overture or as it is now known "Yahoo" was the original inventor of the P4P or Pay for Performance principle. Overture noticed that the internet was quickly becoming the easiest and most suitable method to shop and advertising would be at an all time high because of the numerous businesses in the field attracting website visitors.
To get a visitor to visit your website rather than other websites, it must be very noticeable. Placing ads that will direct possible customers to your site will assist in an increase in hits to your site as well as improving your sales. Yahoo offers a service that places a company's ad or sites in their sites that will be shown when accurate keywords are entered.
Yahoo's offer helps to increase traffic by making more people aware by allowing them to view your site and your products. So even with a minimal percentage of successful sales, this could lead to substantial increase in your sales figures for your company.
Receiving a considerable and consistent flow of website hits is every company's objective. Website visitors are potentially the life line of your internet based business.
Yahoo/Overture use the same standards as Google's Adwords. They are alike in that they use keywords or keyword phrases to establish which ads to show per search. The search engine will provide the results in a page. On the right hand side of the page, you'll notice selected ads that have paid for their ads to be seen when certain keywords or keyword phrases are used.
Let's say for example you run a car parts retailer wholesale website. You would need to select keywords like Honda Accord that will trigger or prompt your ads to be viewed in the page when the keyword is entered.
You will be expected to pay for using this service. There are various ways Yahoo/Overture can charge you. It could be per the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or how many times your ad is clicked on. Other offers could be having your ad viewed in other third party websites.
It's a marketing tactic that will boost your website visitors, increasing sales and resulting in profit, which inturn makes your investment to advertise a wise one.
Bob Cotto has over 35 years experience in Senior Sales and Marketing Management positions with a variety of companies, such as We The People (largest legal document preparation franchise in US), IRM (retirement planning company for educators), Live Marketing (leading international trade show marketing company), Cigna Securities (broker dealer arm for insurance giant) and many others. For each of these companies, he's led the sales and marketing teams to triple digit record breaking growth year after year. If there's one thing he understands, its business. And that's why he KNOWS that the Ultimate Business In A Box has everything you'll need to succeed.
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