SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - An Introduction

You spent a good deal, worked hard for many days and nights and built a great website, but alas! it doesn't get enough visitors. There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there and your website is totally lost in the shuffle, like the proverbial needle in a haystack. When search engines ignore your site, your site becomes non-existent in the cyber world. The real problem with your website is that it failed to harness the most cost-effective and powerful Internet marketing strategy: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site appear at the top of search engine results for your domain-specific keywords and phrases. The higher your website ranks in the results of Google, Yahoo, MSN etc., the greater the chance that your site will be visited by many, which in turn would skyrocket your sales.

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is about making your website visible on search engines. Its commercial purpose is to be the first to hit a customer base effectively. Why Search Engine Optimize

Everyday, millions of people search the web to find out what they look for. If your website doesn't come up top in the results, you lose your business to your competitors. SEO is important not only because it brings lots of visitors to your website, but also because it helps to increase the return on investment, if harnessed properly. Say for example, you have a website that sells mobile phones online. Optimizing the site for targeted keywords like 'low cost mobile phones' would bring it to the top results on popular search engines. This would in turn bring prospective customers to your site, which would result in higher sales.

However, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that requires patience, careful planning, and a long-term approach. Don't worry, here are 4 easy steps that will help you get started with optimizing your website.

4 Easy Steps to get started with Search Engine Optimization

a) Create traffic targeted content
Identify the keywords, i.e., words or phrases using which your potential customers will search the web. Example, if you are a hair salon, they will probably search using the keywords "hair cut", "hairstyle", etc. After identifying and gathering a set of keywords, categorize them under various themes and write web contents on those themes. That is, under the "hairstyle" theme, you can put keywords such as hairstyles, crew cut, long cut, short cut, curly cut, layered cut, etc. Using a Keyword Suggestion tool, you can see how many people search for a certain keyword. Any keyword for which the number of listings is less and the number of searches is more gives you a better chance of ranking higher than keywords for which the listings are more and the searches are less. Once you got the right keyword, use it appropriately in the page so that the page appeals to both the visitors and the Search Engines.

HTML tags such as title tags and meta tags also play a role in ranking top on search engines. These tags must contain only relevant keywords. Neither fill these tags with keywords that don't appear in the content nor leave them empty.

b) Make your pages Search Engine Ready
Check if your pages are search engine ready, i.e., are they crawlable by search engine spiders, is there something in them that will make the Search Engine neglect the page or give it a lower ranking.

To make your pages search engine ready

• Your website content must be readable. For the sake of appearing top on the search engines, do not make the content clumsy by repeatedly using the keywords. These kinds of clumsy sites may get top rank, but won't get readers.
• Add only relevant keywords: Do not stuff the website content, title tag, and meta tags with too many keywords. The keywords that are provided in the title and meta tags must appear in the website content.
• Do not add invisible text: Most of the search engines find them out and ban those sites.

c)Submit your site to Search Engines.
Now that you have made your site search engine ready, start submitting it to the popular search engines. That way, they know your site exists. Some search engines may require periodical submission. If you find the submission process tough, get a Site Submission tool available on the web. (More on Submitting to Search Engines)

d)Track your performance
Often times, people complain that their position in search engines has gone down. We must not forget that Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process for reasons like, Search Engines changing their algorithm frequently, new sites coming up for the same keywords as yours, your watch sites (competitor sites) optimizing themselves for search engines and so on. Thus, it is important you keep track of where you rank for each of your keywords in the most important search engines and constantly modify the content so that search engines know that your page is active. This enhances your rank on the search results.

Conclusion
Although Search Engine Optimization seems to be so complicated at the outset, it really is a simple and interesting process that you will enjoy doing yourself. Search Engine Optimization is the most cost-effective, easy to implement Internet marketing strategy that can get you more traffic and in effect more revenue. So go ahead, start optimizing your site. Happy Search Engine Optimizing...

9 Simple Steps toward a Search Engine Optimized Website

Search Engine Optimization - An Introduction

Search Engine Optimization is probably the cheapest and most cost effective form of Internet marketing. In fact some studies indicate Search Engine Optimization as being the second most effective marketing strategy. The increasing popularity of Search Engines and the fact that good quality and cost effective traffic can be brought through them to websites has led to the development of a whole industry that revolves around how to make Web pages/Websites more search engine friendly or in other words better optimized. The result of this advent of Search Engine Optimization industry is the feeling among webmasters and novices in the industry that SEO is like rocket science and has to be handled by professionals only. Thankfully, the truth is that anyone can search engine optimize Websites. All it takes to optimize a Web site and get better ranking and traffic are 9 simple steps.

The 9 Simple Steps

1. Select Right Keywords

This is THE most important step and can easily be the reason for your ranking ahead or ranking below your watch sites (competition). Identify the words or phrases using which people search(might search) for your Web page on the Internet. If you sell dog food, your keywords must have something to do with "dog food". Do not use irrelevant keywords, even if they get you more traffic. If you are not sure of the keywords to be used, use any of the following tools to find good target phrases:

• Overture is a great tool for assessing popularity of target phrases.
• Googleis great for brainstorming target phrases.
• Word Tracker can help you assess popularity and compare how the competitors use the target phrase.

2. Analyze Competition

Determine who your competitors are. It is quite simple; search for the keyword on popular search engines. The sites that show up above your page are your competitors. Analyze those sites and find out how effectively they have used the targeted keywords. Remember that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. Sometimes, it makes sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase.

Check out yours and your competitor's link popularity. In many engines, you can type: link:http://domain-name and get a link count for that particular site. The more the link count, the better.

3. Page Creation and Optimization

After identifying the keywords, create Web pages by targeting one word or phrase for each page. One common mistake most novice SEO's do is dump many keywords into a page. Not only does it make it difficult for you to rank high for each of those keywords, but also it makes the page less readable.

i) Make sure your keywords are present in the following places:

• Title tag
• META tags: Description tag and Keywords tag
• Body text: Heading tags, comment tags,alt tags and prominent places on the page content

ii) Conduct HTML validation for your Web pages. HTML validation helps you find out the errors in HTML code, which may prevent search engines from indexing your site.

iii)Then check and ensure that your pages are Spam-free. When your page elements, such as Title tag, META tag, and body text, are stuffed with repeated keywords, search engines may consider them Spam and ban your site.

4. Visual Review of Page

• Check whether your site has usable navigation.
• Ensure you have informative and readable content. Good content will ensure that your page appeals to human visitors as well as spiders.

A badly written page may get a good ranking on search engines, but visitors will move away from your site with the same speed they came in. Although Search engine spiders that grade your site will not look for visual appeal, directory editors and human visitors will!.

5.Link Building

Get inbound links from quality sites. Quality sites are those that rank high on search engines and/or have a good Google PageRank. If the sites are in someway connected with the theme of your webpage that will help increase your rank better. DO NOT turn to link farms for link building this can get your site banned in search engines.

6. Submitting to Search Engines

If you have followed steps one to five you are ready to submit your webpages to the search engines. Chances are the search engines found your webpages through the links that you built but if they some how missed your webpages don't worry you can always let them know that your pages exist through Search Engine Submission.

You can refer the below link for details on submission to search engines

Altavista

http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl

All The Web
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

MSN
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Yahoo
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

7. Submitting to Directories

Search Engines consider Web Directories as expert documents. A presence in popular directories can help you get a better ranking on search engines. You can submit your site to popular directories, such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, and Microsoft bCentral. For more information on Web Directories and guidelines for submission.

8. Maintain

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process. Popular Search Engines keep making changes to their algorithms i.e the way they rank webpages quite often. Thus it is imperative that you continually optimize your pages based on the current algorithms to achieve high ranks.
It's important to measure your rankings atleast monthly. Re-optimize any pages that drop in rank and then re-submit or wait for the search engine to revisit the page.

9. Tracking

Ultimately, it is not top rankings you are really after, but more traffic and sales. High traffic is not something that automatically follows top rankings. It is something you get by ranking high for "good keywords". Thus it is important that you track your website usage using a good log file analysis program and find out which keywords and which keywords bring in most visitors to your pages. Use this information to optimize your pages better for these terms and search engines.

Conclusion

At first glance, search engine optimization may look like magic; but actually all it takes is 9 simple steps. Search Engine Optimization is a simple continuous process that helps search engine do their job more efficiently. It does take a lot of time and patience but stay the course search engine optimization pays for itself in increased revenue. It is worth the time and trouble.

If you follow all the above-listed steps, you will definitely see an improvement in the search engine rankings for your keywords. The best part is that you do not have to spend any money on the expensive search engine optimizers!

An Introduction to Title Tag Optimization

Title tags are the words that appear at the very top of your web browser, and they tell the search engine what the page is about. For example, see the top band of this browser. You will see "Title Tag Optimization - Search Engine Optimization Tips ". This is the title of this page.

Before discussing how to optimize the Title tag, lets see how exactly it looks in your website's HTML code.

< Title of Your Web page Here< /title >
< name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of the page">
< name="keywords" content="keyword phrases that describe your web page">
< /head >
< meta content="Brief description of the contents of the page" name="description" >
< meta content="keyword phrases that describe your web page" name="keywords" >
Title Tags - The Myth
"The Title tag doesn't really do much".

Is that a myth or the truth? Let's see! Title tags function much like the title of a book. Say for example, you need a book on "Search Engine Optimization". You walk into a library, search all the titles, see a book titled "Search Engine Optimization Tips", and take that book. Interestingly, there were some other books in the library, which had more information on Search Engine Optimization than the book you took. But, their title didn't convey that. Search engines also do the same thing: they look at the title of a web page and decide what it is about. There is no doubt among the SEOs regarding the importance of Title tags in Search Engine Optimization. One of the steps to increase a website's rank is optimizing the Title tags.

How to Optimize Title Tag?

Of all the tags, Title tag is definitely the most important when used correctly. When calculating your web page's relevance to a search, most search engines consider the content of the title tag as one of the parameters and display that content in search engine results pages (SERP). Title tag therefore needs to be carefully constructed in such a way that it increases your website's position in the SERP, and it is attractive enough to encourage a surfer to click on your link.

Similar to writing your site content; write your Title tag for your audience first and the search engines second

• Have your keywords in the Title tag: Including the keywords in the Title tag increases the relevance of your web page, when someone searches the web with that keyword.
• Keep the Title tag short and readable: Search engines don't prefer long Title tags. In fact, Google prefers short Title tags. Because some search engines display Title tags in the search engine result pages, make them informative.
• Use different Title tags for different web pages in your site: Never give the same Title tag for all the web pages. The Title tag of a web page must be relevant for that page.
• Don't include your company name in the Title tag unless you think it will attract more users. Instead of your company name, you can consider a suitable keyword.
• Never keep the Title tag empty and never use irrelevant words in the Title tag.

Pay attention to writing your title tag. Don't ignore them, they are a powerful tool and must be used to their fullest advantage. The Title tag helps the search engines decide the theme of the web page being crawled for indexing. When a search for keywords is conducted, the Title tag is given heavy consideration by all search engine algorithms. Also remember, each page in your website is unique and needs a different Title tag. Place the most important keyword phrase for that specific page in the Title tag, and the page will get a certain boost in the search engines. Yahoo and MSN Search are especially influenced by keyword-rich Title tags. Look after your Title tags and they will look after your site traffic.

Optimization for Yahoo

Why Optimize for Yahoo?

According to a recent study, of all the searches done through search engines, around 25% of searches are done through Yahoo. That means, if your site is not coming up on Yahoo, you lose 25 percent of your potential visitors. Until February 2004, Yahoo used Google results. So, optimizing for Google was enough to get a top rank on Yahoo. As of 17th February 2004, Yahoo dropped Google results and instead showed search results using Inktomi algorithm. Yahoo's shift from Google to Inktomi made optimizing for Yahoo inevitable.

The New Yahoo Search Engine

Although Inktomi / Yahoo search algorithm doesn't differ too much from that of Google's, it is not exactly a clone of Google's algorithm. Based on the search results on Yahoo, it seems Yahoo's new algorithm gives much importance to keyword density in body text, Title tag, and META tags and to inbound links. Therefore, concentrating on these two items will definitely increase your site's ranking on Yahoo.

Keyword Density

The new Yahoo search engine gives more importance to keyword density. A Website with high keyword density may fare well in Yahoo. The average keyword counts that seem to work are as follows:

• Title Tag - 15% to 20%: Yahoo displays the title tag content in its result page. Therefore, write the title as a readable sentence. A catchy title will attract the reader to come to your Website.
• Body Text - 3%: Boldfacing the keywords sometimes boosts the page's ranking. But, be careful not to be awkward to the readers. Too much of boldfaced content irritates readers.
• META Tags - 3%: In META description and Keyword tags, provide important keywords at the beginning. Do not use the keywords repeatedly in the Keyword tag, because Yahoo may consider it Spamming. Write the description tag as a readable sentence.

Inbound Links/Back Links

Yahoo considers inbound links highly important. Inbound links are the links from other sites pointing to your site. Having considerable links, with appropriate link texts, from quality sites increases your site's ranking in Yahoo.

Static Pages versus Dynamic Pages

Like most other search engines Yahoo prefers static pages to dynamic pages. Sometimes, Yahoo may fail to index dynamic pages. Therefore, consider the following tips to ensure that Yahoo indexes all your web pages:

• Have static pages with keyword-rich content; it increases the rank of your site on Yahoo
• If you have some important dynamic pages, prepare a site map or quick links section with links to all the Web pages. This would help the Yahoo spider to craw all your pages.

Frames

Most of the search engines, Yahoo in particular, hate frames. Avoid using frames on your site, because Yahoo spider finds it difficult to crawl them.

The sure-shot solution to rank high on yahoo is simply getting plenty of back links from quality sites, and then having copious keywords in the body text, title, META, and alt tags. As Yahoo holds the 25% share of the Internet searches, it is prudent to have your Web pages optimized for Yahoo. When your Web page ranks high on Yahoo, you get additional traffic that will convert into increased sales.

Vincent S Brown - 1st September 2005

Internet Marketing by Gatesix