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What Is Search Engine Optimization?
Copyright (C) 2004 F. Terrence Markle
It is no secret that search engines are the number one
traffic generating method for driving visitors to the
different websites. Search engines are very useful in
helping people find the relevant information they seek
on the Internet. The major search engines develop and
maintain their own gigantic database of websites that
can be searched by a user typing a keyword or keyword
phrase into the search box.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of
studying the search engines in an effort to determine how
to get your website to rank high on user searches. Rank
is the position in the search engine results page that a
website appears when someone searches for a specific
keyword or keyword phrase.
It's possible to get a significant amount of free traffic from
the major search engines if you properly optimize your web
site pages. Depending on the statistical information reviewed,
search engines account for over 80% of the visitor traffic
to websites.
Within the search engine category, Google accounts for most
of the search engine traffic. The other top search engines
include but are not limited to: Yahoo, AOL Search, Overture,
AllTheWeb, MSN Search, WiseNut, HotBot, Teoma, and Ask
Jeeves. You can register your web site with the various search
engines but it is a demanding process and takes time.
Visitor traffic from the search engines can be obtained through
organic (natural) or pay-per-click (PPC) search results. The non-
paid organic search results are the list of websites (generally
10 per page) returned when a user searches on a specific
keyword or keyword phrase. Keyword is the word or phrase that
is typed into the search engine's search box. The PPC items are
the paid advertisements for a specific keyword or keyword phrase
and listed on the same page as the organic search results.
You are telling the search engines what your web site is about
when you employ SEO tactics. Search engine optimization
involves the layout of your web page so that it is very easy to
navigate and read. In addition, you must skillfully place your
keywords in your web page in a manner that conveys the
information that is being searched for by your visitor.
The keywords should be placed in the title tag, meta description
tag and at the beginning of the body tag sections. The keyword
density (i.e., number of times your specific keywords appear in
each page) should be in the range of 5 to 15 percent. Search
engines look for relevant and original content in your web page
that is relative to the your site's keyword theme.
Search engines find out about your web site through your
submission to the search engine or through a link to your site
from another website that has already been indexed. It helps to
have a lot of quality and relevant links into your website.
The search engine uses a spider (i.e., a computer program) to
index (i.e., classify and include in the search engine database)
your individual web site pages. The spider is often referred to
as a crawler. These spiders follow links from one site to another
site and create an index of information for inclusion in the search
engine database on each web page they visit.
The spider is more likely to index a static HTML web page higher
than one generated dynamically. You can make your web page
more search engine friendly by reducing or eliminating any flash
animation or graphics in your web page.
Your web site should have a site map on a separate web page. A
site map displays a visual model of the pages within your web site.
It enables the search engine spider to quickly find all your web pages
and provides a great navigation tool for your site visitors. Each
listing
in your site map should be an active link to enable your visitor to
click
on the link and move directly to that specific section of your web
site.
Design each page of your web site so that the keyword or keyword
phrase information being searched for by your visitors can be easily
found. You need to convey the central message or theme of your web
page to your visitors.
It will take a lot of concentrated work to achieve a top ranking in
any of
the search engines. Most search engine users do not go past page
one or two of the search results. Therefore, you want to rank as high
as possible on the first search results page to maximize your chances
of attracting targeted and quality traffic to your web site.
In conclusion, build your web site to be search engine friendly.
Optimize
each web page on your site so that the keywords are properly placed in
the title, description and headline tags. Convey quality and useful
information to your site visitors that is tied to the keyword theme
for that
page. Keep the keyword density within an acceptable range. Learn
from your competitors. What are they doing to obtain the high search
engine placements? Model your SEO activites after the winners.
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Copyright (C) 2004 F. Terrence Markle ? All Rights Reserved Get my
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