There is a bit of confusion about search engine optimization. Some people think that SEO (the abbreviated form) is nothing more than tricking search engines into giving a high ranking for a particular site. Others think that search engine optimization is so complex that they could not possibly understand it. Neither of these views are correct. Search engine optimization is best defined as the art and science of building web pages that are both search engine friendly and user friendly. Below are four basic steps that you should take when optimizing your web pages.

1. Your web design should emphasize text and not graphics.

“Search engine friendly” means that search engines should be able to find data on your site that they can put in their data bases. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a search engine is trying to classify pages by text and not by images. If you have an opening page with a beautiful picture of the sea and only two words of text saying “enter here” then this page will not rank high in searches for Florida Vacations. Similarly if you have a headline with important text containing your site’s keywords it should not be displayed as a gif or jpeg image. Pages that are all flash or all images are not search engine friendly, and often are not user friendly as well.

2. Links to your interior pages should be easily found by search engines

An important thing to remember is that you want not only your main page, but all of your interior pages to be included in the search engine index. While most people will probably enter your site through the main page, many will enter after doing searches which lead them to your inner pages. The best way to make sure that search engines will find and index your inner pages is to include text links to these pages. If you have navigation system which uses Java script or images, then it is best to add an additional text link navigation bar at the bottom of the site to ensure that the robot follows the links to your inner pages.

3. Your pages should be built around specific keywords or keyword phrases

Robotic search engines and human users have one thing in common: they are trying to figure out what your site or your particular web page is all about. It is not possible to get high rankings for thirty different search terms with only one web page. However it is possible to build separate web pages which explain and give importance to various aspects of your organization’s activity. These sub pages can be optimized so that they perform well in searches for your various keywords.

4. Once your material is organized, then your keywords should appear in strategic portions of your web pages

If your site is about Florida Vacations, then these words should appear in the following places of your html pages:

a. In the file name or the url.

If your site is called http://www.floridavacations.com then this will give you a head start in any searches for this term. Similarly if your company is called XYZ Travels you may have a web page with this url: [http://www.xyztravels.com/floridavacations.html]

The url or file name is an important indicator to a search engine, so don’t miss the opportunity to put your important term either in your main domain name or in your file names.

b. In the title tag

The text that is displayed in the blue line at the top of your browser is your title tag. The title tag is located in the
section of the document. If your main phrase is “Florida Vacations” then the title tag in your html document should look something like this: Florida Vacations: Florida Vacation Information by XYZ travel

c. In the Description tag

The description tag is not seen on the web page but search engines often display it as the text which gives the searcher an idea of what your page is about. The description tag should be compelling, and make someone want to click and see your page, while also containing the keywords that are in your url and your title tag. A description tag for this site might look as follows:

d. In the headlines

Just as someone reading a newspaper looks at headlines to find out what is important, a search engine robot looks at the headlines of a web page in order to pick up the essential feature of that page. Put your main phrase in a headline and place it near the top of the page. Your headline text should be enclosed with special header tags such as h1, h2, h3. A headline tag for our hypothetical page could be written as follows: h1 Florida Vacations: Plan Your Vacation Now And Save Money or Accommodations, Entertainment and Transport in Florida h1

If you don’t like the look of the h1 tag, then use a smaller tag, h2 or h3, or adjust your site
‘s style sheet so that the h1 tag is displayed in a small font which better matches your body text.

e. In the body text of your page

Your main keywords or key phrase should appear in the first paragraph of text and in a natural way throughout the text and also at the end of the page. In normal writing you would first introduce your subject, then explain what it is about and then summarize at the end. Follow this same procedure when you start writing your web page. Pages written in this style will automatically have correct keyword density and distribution.

f. In anchor text on your page

Anchor text is the clickable portion of links on your web page. Suppose you are describing your Florida Vacations and you want to direct your web visitors to an inside page with more information about this subject. Instead of making a link that says “click here,” it would be better to have a link that says “Click here for more information about Florida Vacations” or even better, the link text will only be “Florida Vacations” and the “click here” will be rendered as normal text.

If you follow these search-engine-optimization steps when building your website you will end up with web pages that are easily understood by your visitors, and easily classified and indexed by search engines.

Search engines acts as a bridge between millions of web pages and humans. Without the help of these friendly search engines, these sites would have remained hidden for many of us. Imagine finding a web page without the help of a Search engine? Your attempt will be a failure if you are not using a popular search engine. As of now, Search engines are the only source to find reliable information, which are scattered, in millions of web pages. It makes sharing of web pages an easy task. Day and night, these Search Engines work very hard without any interruption, to produce valuable search results for us.

All the pages in the world of Internet are linked each other via links. If one page exists independently, without any links pointing towards it, it will be hidden for search engines. Search engines find a web site through the links placed by these web sites in other sites. When the spider sent by a Search Engine visits a particular page it looks for further links after analyzing the web page. The links placed in a very popular page will be seen by these Search engines as a valuable source of information. Through these links it understands about websites. The keywords mentioned in the WebPages are also an important source of information for search engines. With these keywords and links, they are able to produce relevant results from among millions of web pages.

Search engines regularly update their database with the updated information it fetches from millions of web pages around the globe. It is then stored in a database format for future use. These regular updating periodically makes it more reliable in an ever-changing world.

Search engine optimization can make or break your website and therefore your online business will do little to nothing in the earning money aspect of internet marketing. Time spent learning proper SEO strategies will be time well spent and your time is valuable so don’t waste it.

What does an internet marketing need to know for proper search engine optimization? Well to me you need to know more or at least apply more SEO knowledge than those site owners you want to pass in the search engines. It’s that straight forward.

You can pay me or others to have your web pages optimized to give you the best bang for your buck in the search engines and that will get you listed higher which gives you a better chance at making a sale. Of course even if you get visitors it doesn’t mean you sales copy will sell them, but that’s for another day and another article, isn’t it.

I always enjoy being paid but at the same time the teacher in me wants you to learn to do this for yourself so keep your money and read on…

Search Engine Optimization Strategy One:

Learn what others are doing to make their web page land on the first search engine results page. Discover all you can about each site that gets listing on the first two pages of results. At least the first two pages so you get an understanding and you will also find more than one strategy being used, so pay close attention.

How do you find those sites, well you have to use the keywords that represent your product to your target group. You will even learn of new keywords and phrases as you start to dissect your competitors web pages.

Example: If you are promoting ‘car care products’ then you go to Google and do a search for this term. Do two searches on this phrase and any other phrases you are using. One without quotes and one with quotes.

Doing two searches this way will let you know how many sites are out there promoting based on the exact same keyword phrase your are using.

Google: “car care products” = 606,000

Google: car care products = 38,200,000

From this you can see that there are 600 thousand pages out there about car care products and that means you would have a lot of competition.

Once you have your search engine results page for your search term in quotes start looking through the results and take notes.

What are you looking for?

1. You want to learn how they use the search term or keyword phrase on their page.

This means that you need to look at the headings and paragraphs to see how many times that phrase was used and the exact location it was used.

Was the phrase bolded or italized, is it in a header one, is the phrase a hyper link anywhere on the page?

Learn all you can from the browser page.

2. Open the source code for the web page you are researching and see what other keywords and phrases they use.

What are the other keywords? You will later do the same research on the new keywords you find.

If you do this and use the same strategies for keywords and phrase placement you will increase your own page ranking. Do this consistently and you will be able to pass those that are ranked ahead of you.

Look for other strategies from us on search engine optimization strategies that work.

While Google is the number one search engine, and will likely continue to be that for a number of years, there is several thousand lesser search engines that are working hard to gain a part of the search market for themselves.

The English language market for search is largely made up of a few big giants. According to a report by comScore the market in October 2009 was dominated by Google (65.4%), Yahoo (18.0%), Microsoft (9.9%), Ask (3.9%) and AOL (2.9%), MapQuest, eBay, craigslist, Fox, MySpace, Facebook and Amazon.

With the search market valued at $300 Billion that makes every single 1% worth $3 Billion if selling the company and you would do very well by conquering just a 0.1% slice of that cake. The amount of search start-ups is only going to increase with more venture capital wanting a piece of the market.

My list of 7 is search engines that could very well make news in 2010. Not all of them are new, some are, but all have in common that they have been innovating in 2009 and they deliver good search results.

Cuil

With two ex Googlers, Anna Patterson and Russell Power, in management and with the claim of being the worlds biggest search engine Cuil has a lot to deliver.

Overloaded servers that generated low quality search results hampered the initial 2008 launch giving Cuil a fair amount of negative media attention but of you try it out today you’ll find that the search results are good and there is an explore by category function that is among the best I have seen.

DuckDuckGo

Sporting a Zero-click information box with facts about your search term, categories to refine your search and a special designation for the official site for the search term this search engine combines results from Yahoo BOSS, Wikipedia and its own crawler DuckDuckBot to give you neat and really useful search results.

Founded by Gabriel Weinberg, who started and then sold The Names Database, DuckDuckGo is a private venture and has grown steadily since its launch in September 2008. I think this search engine has a good niche carved out for itself, watch out for this search engine in 2010

Spezify

This search engine is totally awesome. It draws the search results as newspaper clippings spread out on the screen with a mix of images and quotes from web pages. By scanning some of the clippings you get a decent overview of the topic you are researching and can make an informed decision on which search results to visit and read more about.

Spezify is very handy tool for brainstorming. You’ll get a ton of new ideas for your article or blog post just by typing your topic into the search box and watching the resulting mix of clippings and photos.

Secret Search Engine Labs

This search engine provides alternative search results by giving small sites the same opportunity to rank as large sites. With Google’s notorious preference for large, established sites like the Wikipedia and About many small sites get lost among the big boys giving room for alternative ways of ranking.

Secret Search Engine Labs was started as a hobby project in 2007 by Finnish software engineer Simon Byholm, has been growing steadily, and now has the aim of becoming the worlds best search engine by providing alternative search results and transparency about how sites are ranked.

Bing

First we had MSN Search, then Live Search and now with the latest re-launch we have Bing. With a strong marketing campaign Microsoft has managed to grab almost 10% of the marketplace for web search. The media attention surrounding the re-launch has fueled innovation adding new functions like the daily change in background photo, suggested topics and trends.

Watch Bing closely in 2010 as Microsoft is finally taking action to increase their market share. We are probably going to see more news from Bing in the year to come.

Blekko

This is a fresh start-up that keeps its secrets almost as well as Google when asked about the what and the when of their new search engine. The strong management team with former employees from Topix, Google, AOL and Netscape Search makes me believe they have something fascinating going on.

We are still waiting for Blekkos official launch. It was promised by the end of 2009 though so you can expect it to make some serious headlines in 2010. We can only wish that it is exciting news.

Monitter

Monitter is not a classic search engine but a real time Twitter search where you can monitor several keywords and see all tweets containing those keywords in real time as they happen. When you need to monitor you niche or area of expertise or if you just want to keep an eye on the conversation this is a great tool.

What About The Rest?

Chances are you already know that Google is innovating and you probably know they will make some noise in 2010. Wolfram Alpha is fascinating as it is the only major search engine that makes the results from data.

In addition to my list of seven there is also a multitude of new social and real-time search engines coming and there’s no way to know if one of them will become a permanent participant in the search market. You’ll find more information about these and thousands more at AltSearchengines.com

There is now signs that we could see radical changes in the search engine landscape after years of rule by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and to some extent Ask. There’s so much new technology on display. New search engines making use of social networks, visual presentation, new semantic algorithms and real-time results to stand out from the crown are popping up everywhere.

The result, even if we get no new top three, is that the ruling giants will have to keep innovating to keep up with the crowd and in the end we’ll get a better search experience.

The following article is one of a series of articles which focus on Affiliate, Article and Internet Marketing. All of the articles are based on real experiences and research done over twenty years as a personal and business coach. They are also written in response to questions which I have been asked as well as address common challenges that people have with affiliate marketing, article marketing, internet marketing or running an online business in general. I sincerely hope that you find the following information of value. One idea, one tip, one clue can make all the difference.

Search Engine Marketing – Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you – the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this
issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make
a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to
each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords – the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of
the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in “free link popularity check” in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more
quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality
customers will be directed your way.

(If you are considering hiring a search engine optimization service, please read my article “Choosing A Search Engine Optimization Company”.)

Why is this an important part of your search engine marketing?

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