What is Search Engine Optimization?
When was the last time you used a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo? Lets say you were looking for pizza joints in your town, or auto mechanics, or even taxi cabs. More people nowadays use search engines to find businesses like yours than they use the yellow pages. (If you have any doubt, ask someone in their 20’s when was the last time they used the yellow pages. They may well look at you as if you had asked them how many LP’s they had played lately).
When you made your initial search, how many results came up? Most likely hundreds, if not thousands. How many did you look through before you got bored and went and did something else? (Likely, not more than about 10, maybe 20 if you were really interested in the topic. Chances are, you got hungry and just chose one of the first few choices on the first page. Certainly, you didn’t scroll through all of the choices there, before making a selection.
Now, picture yourself as the business owner on the other end of the search engines. You would very much like to be positioned on that first page of google or yahoo, wouldn’t you? Because you know that this is how customers find you, and you don’t have to pay money to get listed here. But the chances of you getting listed on the front page, just because you have a business and a website, are not very good. Your competitors are all taking advantage of some techniques that help them get higher ranking than you have, even if their pizza isn’t half as good. (If people do not know you are there, no matter how good your pizza is, no one will buy it.) These techniques are called Search Engine Optimization.
I don’t try to get into all of the intricacies of Search Engine Optimization here, but to give a good overview of what is required.
Search Engine Optimization is simply a bunch of techniques that help get websites a higher ranking within the major online search engines. I’ll start off with explaining a little on getting websites to rank well in the search engines:
Search engines rank websites in their indexes relative to votes cast by other websites in the form of hypertext links from one site to another. It’s like a popularity vote. The more votes the better, or the more links the better. Though it’s not as simple as that: other considerations are the quality of the votes supplied.
The quality of votes supplied means:
1) The previous ranking by the search engines of the website that is providing the link to your website.
2) The demographic of the votes cast, meaning the age of the website casting the vote. An existing website that has been acknowledged by search engines as an authority website, that has been around for say 5 years will cast a stronger vote than another website that is only 12 months old, etc.
3) The location of the website casting the vote. If there are many websites casting votes to your website from many different places around the world, this shows to the search engines that your website has a wide audience and then grants it higher rankings accordingly.
The opposite of this would be 50 domains hosted on just one server, each with links pointing to your website. This situation in the past used to work well though these days does not help get your website ranking highly for competitive terms in the search engines.
The best case scenario is to get a LOT of votes or links from previously aged, high trafficked, high ranking websites from all around the world casting votes via links to your website.
This is the recipe for success in getting your website ranked for competitive terms that supply free search engine traffic to your website.
After linking to your website, we need to address several “On-Page” items:
1. On-page Search Engine Optimization and Title Tags…
2. Keyword in URL…
3. Anchor text or Link Names…
4. Semantic relation to keyword phrases.
1. On-page SEO and Title Tags.
The most important part about getting websites ranked highly in the search engines is a great backlinking program. Maximum efficiency is achieved by using the same anchor text in the links pointing to your website, be it the domain itself, or sub directories within it, and the same keyword phrase that is in the anchor text, in the title of the website you are promoting. This may sound confusing, but I can show you some examples when we get to discussing this further
Each webpage of your site has what’s called a title tag. e.g if you view the source of any webpage, you will see the title tag like this
<TITLE> Website title goes here </TITLE>.
I would go as far as saying, that unless you have your chosen keyword phrase in this title tag, you will have very little chance of ranking well for your chosen keyword phrase. I will explain below and in other supplied documents how you can maximize your use of adding multiple keyword phrases in one title tag to get multiple high listings from just one webpage.
Additionally the anchor text of the linking site, should reflect the keyword phrase/s listed in your title tags.
Search Engine Optimization also includes the art of designing your website with the hopes of achieving high rankings among the online search engines.
After you have optimized your website and content, submit your website to search engines such as Yahoo or Google as well as others. Success will not be experienced overnight. Sometimes it takes months to see good results. Keep this in mind if your website is new or very small.
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