SEO

Your SEO Success Guide

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

If you aren’t familiar with what Search Engine Optimization is let’s break that down so you understand it.  Search Engine Optimization or SEO is simply the act of manipulating the pages of your website to be easily accessible by search engine spiders (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) so they can be easily spidered and indexed.  A spider is a robot that search engines use to check millions of web pages very quickly and sort them by relevance.  A page is indexed when it is spidered and deemed appropriate content to be placed in the search engines results for people to click on.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers.  When you type in a topic for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed and present you with ones that match your topic.  The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results.  So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Tip: The easiest way to achieve great SEO is to power your website with WordPress.  WordPress combined with an optimized theme gets you higher search engine rankings with less work.  Google loves WordPress blogs.  If you can type, you can use WordPress as your Content Management System.

Further, almost all visitors use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else.  So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play a more important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

Tip: Research and find profitable keywords.  You will want to use keywords that are being searched for that will produce buyers.  Once found, design your website, pages and articles around these profitable keywords!

It is found by surveys that, when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their information in one of the following ways:

• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.

• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link (link popularity) from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.

• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend (i.e. social networks) or reading in an article (you should write and submit keyword rich articles) or e-zine/newsletter.

Thus it’s obvious the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users.  In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page.  Don’t forget that algorithms also give weight to link popularity (number of web pages linking to your site).  When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, optimizing your site for high search engine rankings really does work.  Keep in mind, these experts can be expensive.  With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Tip:  Do not build your webpages using only Flash.  Search engines do not read flash-only webpages, and they will not be able to index and rank your site.

A search engine is the most effective tool that can bring a prospective customer to your Company website.  Millions of web visits are initiated daily through one or the other search engine to locate information or sources of supply.  This is considered to be the most effective and targeted channel for you as a website owner to acquire a hot lead.  Businesses all the over the world spend a huge sum on designing, building, maintaining and promoting their websites.

Online advertising and marketing budgets have soared.  Relative to these, the investment required for getting traffic through search engines is much lower.  However, as search engines have millions of pages in their coverage, it is important to have a proper approach to using this channel effectively.

The art and science of understanding how search engines identify pages that are relevant to a query made by a visitor and designing marketing strategies based on this is called search engine optimization.  Search engines offer the most cost effective mechanism to acquire “real” and “live” business leads.  It is found that in most cases search engine optimization delivers better ROI than other forms such as online advertisements, e-mail marketing and newsletters, affiliate and pay per click advertising, and digital campaigns and promotions.

Before you begin to develop your own strategy and implementation plan to optimize your website for improved page ranking and more importantly Search Engine Result Position (SERP), you have to reflect on what is the major objective of this initiative.  Is it your objective to attract more visitors to your site or convert more persons from being a visitor to a loyal stakeholder in your business, (A customer)?

Most companies realize getting new visitors and making them RETURN visitors is what’s really critical to a business’ success.  It is sticky visitors, loyalty and ultimately the impact return customers have on its bottom line.  What is certainly more important is what the site does to acquire and retain customers and retain existing customers.

What Is Your SEO Plan

Image via Wikipedia

The first step that advertisers and marketing professionals need to take to apply optimization techniques to a website is to visualize the objective and characterize the visitor, the desired visitor experience and outcome.  The optimization plan should evolve out of this.

Search Engines provide you an effective vehicle for promotion of your website.  The key determinant is what value the initiative offers you in return for the investment.

Submitting Your Site To The Search Engines

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine.  Only after search engine submission should you worry about press releases, articles, banner ads, or newsletters.  These are very effective, but worry about the basics first.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises.  The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

There are two methods of submitting your URL to Search Engines.  One is to use Search Engine Submission services such as “Submit it”, which is a part of MSN Central.  The fee for submitting URLs using this service ranges from $79 to $299 per year. Another is to submit your URL by submitting it individually to popular Search Engines and thus avoiding the fee charged by submission services.  The prevailing advice is that manual submissions should be made to the top five search engines or so and one could use automatic submission services for the rest.

Search Engines and Directories

Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies:

• Search Engine List
  • Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista
  • Google.com, HotBot
  • Excite.com/Webcrawler
  • Ask.com
  • Bing
• Directories List
  • DMOZ.com (ODP)
  • Alltheweb.com (Fast)
  • AOL Search PositionTech
  • Lycos Open Directory
  • MSN, Yahoo!
  • LookSmart Snap
  • PositionTech (AOL, Hotbot, MSN + more)
  • Overture.com (GoTo.com) Paid Inclusion
  • Directhit.com

The following links give info on other search engines and directories:

• http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm
• http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm

Trivia:  Google’s search engine powered Yahoo search directory as early as year 2000.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines, ensure your website pages are thoroughly designed to professional quality using the right keywords, the right amount of keywords, good graphics and pictures with description tags and spelling and grammar checked content.  Don’t submit websites or web pages that are incomplete.  While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Image by chris.corwin via Flickr

Site Maps

One important factor to remember while submitting a site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots.  Search engines like Google hardly consider submissions without sitemaps.

Meta Tags

The Meta tags ‘Description’ and ‘Keywords’ have a vital role as they are indexed in a specific way.  Some of the top search engines do not index the keywords that they consider spam. They will also not index certain ‘stop words’ (commonly used words such as ‘a’ or ‘the’ or ‘of’) so as to save space or speed up the process.  Images are obviously not indexed, but image descriptions or Alt text or “text within comments” is included in the index by some search engines.

To see an example of these, right-click on any webpage and choose “view page source” from the menu.  The above meta tags will appear in the top portion of the resulting html source code.

Keywords

Search engines rank web pages according to their understanding of the web page’s relevancy to the term being searched.  To determine relevancy, each search engine follows its own group of rules. The most important rules are

• The location of keywords on your web page; and
• How often those keywords appear on the page (the frequency or percentage)

For example, if the keyword appears in the title of the page, then it would be considered to be far more relevant than the keyword appearing in the text at the bottom of the page.  Search engines consider keywords to be more relevant if they appear sooner on the page (like in the headline) rather than later.  The idea is that you’ll be putting the most important words – the ones that really have the relevant information – on the page first.

Link Popularity

Link analysis and ‘click through’ measurement are certain other factors that are “off the page” and yet crucial in the ranking mechanism adopted by some leading search engines.  This has emerged as the most important determinant of ranking.

Tip:  Blog comments are one of the easiest tools to use to achieve backlinks to popular websites.  Search engines tend to judge your webpages to be more relevant if they are linked to other popluar websites containing similar relevant topics.

• http://tinyurl.com/yhxkw8e