What
is Search Engine Optimization
The
search engine optimization (SEO) process consists of designing,
tweaking/building optimized web pages, submitting your web pages
and tracking the progress of your campaign to increase the
likelihood that they will appear at the top of search engine
results for targeted keyword phrases. Keywords are words
or phrases that your potential customers are actually typing into
Google, AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, or AOL when they are looking for
information which interests them.
To
get a good and consistent top ranking on the major search engines,
3 factors play a crucial role in them
Text
factor (targeted niche keywords/phrases)
Website
links (how your web site links together internally and
also externally to other sites)
Link
& click through popularity factor (number of links
pointing to yours)
Text
Factor
The
most important part of the search engine optimization process is
keyword selection. In order for your target audience to find your
site on the search engines, your pages must contain keyword
phrases that match the phrases your target audience is typing into
search queries.
Website
links
The
way your pages are linked to each other, and the way your web site
is linked to other web sites will equally effect your search
engine positions. You might have the best keyword rich content
pages, but if the engines spiders are unable to find those text,
all your optimization efforts will still be in vain.
Most
of the major search engine spiders cannot detect sites which have:
Flash
documents
JavaScripts
HTML
Coding
Link
& click through popularity factor
The
number of websites that link to your website is currently one of
the most looked upon factor that help search engines determine
your relevancy and ranking for a particular search term. Link
popularity and gaining new links from outside websites to your
website have proven to be a popular concept for people seeking to
improve their search engine rankings. To learn more about Link
popularity, click here.
Follow
the 6 very basic yet powerful steps you can take to instantly
optimize your site:
Step
1: Select the
right keywords
In
order for your target audience to find your site on the search
engines, your pages MUST contain keyword phrases that match the phrases your target audience
is typing into search queries.
There’s
a tool that allows you to see how often any search phrase or
keyword is actually searched, find out how many competing pages
there are on the Web that feature these phrases, AND get a list of
related search terms! It’s
called WordTracker.
Step
2: Optimizing your website
Once
you have your right keywords or phrases, you will then have to
insert them in your HTML “meta tags”. Different search engines
places different importance on the same HTML “meta tags”. For
example, Google ignores “meta tags” altogether while MSN
Search still places emphasis on them. So it’s not as easy as
things seem to be. There are other factors involved in the
optimization of your pages. These issues are usually taken care by
search engine consultants or optimization softwares.
Step
3: Submitting your website
After
your site is optimized, its time to submit your site to the search
engines and directories. You can do it yourself manually, employ a
submission service or own a software which does fully automated
submission for you. Doing it yourself will be extremely time
consuming and complexed unless you have the necessary skills to do
so. If you have opted to go for a submission service provider,
usually they will charge you for every URL provided, which can
come up to quite a large sum of money, ranging from hundreds to
thousands of dollars for submission alone!
Tip
– you don’t have to actually submit to thousands of search
engines, its pointless! Honestly, how many search engines do YOU
use to make searches on the web? 5?10? People all over the world
are no different from you, they don’t use 20 search engines to
do their searches, they only have a few favorite ones; which are
probably the most popular ones around such as Google, Yahoo,
AltaVista, MSN, AskJeeves, etc.
Step
4: Track your Rankings
Once
your site is submitted, you need to consistently track the
positions of your website in each and every engine that you have
submitted. This helps you to track the effectiveness of all your
marketing & promotional efforts. By doing so, you will be able
to focus your time on optimizing pages which does not have good
placing on that particular engine.
Step
5 : Analyze your Site
You need to analyze and track
the statistics of all the visitors that have come over to your
site. You need to have real time statistics and reports which you
can get instantly on where they are actually came from, what
specific keywords were typed by them to come to your site, which
engines are sending you the most traffic, etc. By fully
understanding your stats, you will able to focus on what works for
you and improve on what doesn’t.
Step
6 : Site Maintenance
Main concerns – slow
loading pages and broken links. You have to constantly check and
maintain the overall “workability” of your site to check out
for broken links and whether there are any pages loading slowly.
This can be a very gruesome, time consuming and boring task if
your site contains huge number of links or pages. This “chore”
is usually handled automatically by optimization softwares or
service providers. If you don’t mind “guessing” and manually
checking for potential problems one by one, you could of course do
it by yourself.
Sideline
- When it comes to the search engine optimizing, we
have always believed in automating the whole process. Reason
being because it simply is too time-consuming to handle everything
manually. With a
number of software around, still Web
Position Gold 2 gets our overall vote! One of the best
software ever produced to date. Click
here to get the details.
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