Search Engine Optimization - What Is It?What is Search Engine Optimization? Simply put, search engine optimization, shortened to SEO, is the term for making sure that your website shows up when potential visitors type keywords or phrases into Google, Yahoo, MSN, or one of their other favorite search engines.
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For better or worse, search engines have become the gatekeepers in this new millennium, deciding who deserves website traffic and who doesn’t, who’s worthy of a referral and who isn’t. Say the words “search engine optimization,” and most people grimace. The process sounds horrible and daunting, but in fact, it’s incredibly fun and easy to learn. To please search engines, you need to “think” like a computer, which, in fact, is fairly simple. Search engines have specific guidelines, and they look for consistent, repetitive patterns. There’s nothing mysterious about the process of search engine optimization. That cherished referral – the one a search engine is making to some website, somewhere in the world – will come to you as soon as you implement a few basic search engine optimization techniques.
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Search Engine Optimization TipsJanuary 12, 2010: Stop focusing on where you rank for certain search terms, and focus instead on the amount of visitors that came to your site from search engine referrals and the keyword phrases they used to get there. SERPs (search engine ranking pages) have always been a moving target, but more so today than ever. Because Google relies heavily on a user's past history, no two people will ever get the same Page One results. And even for the same user, on the same computer, in the same five-minute span, the results can vary dramatically. Remember, trying to rank well for 4-5 phrases isn't the point. Driving good, qualified traffic to your site (from hundreds of phrases) should be the aim.
January 5, 2010: Google seems to have come around and adjusted Page Rank again at the first of the year, and many sites experienced a drop (by one number) on their home pages, but not necessarily their interior pages. If this happened to your site, don't panic. It probably just means that the Page Rank of sites linking into you dropped, which in turn lowered your rank.
December 7, 2009: The average bounce rate for all types of websites is 40%, meaning that a vistor came into the site and left without looking at another page. Check on your analytics or stats to see what your bounce rate is. The lower your bounce rate, the better.
November 1, 2009: Google just came around and recast Page Rank. They do this several times a year, recalculating the Page Rank (on a scale of 0-10) for every page of every website on the Internet. Check your Page Rank to see if it went up or down.
October 20, 2009: The goal of search engine optimization is to position your website to be at the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing pages for hundreds of different keyword searches. Get to the very top (position #1, the first organic listing, right below the sponsored links), and you'll garner an estimated 41% of all traffic for that term. Drop to the #2 position, and your clicks drop to 12%.
September 27, 2009: Want to get a "double" listing on Google - one of those prized situations in which the home page and an interior page of your website come up as the #1 and #2 listings, or the #14 and #15 listings? Create a good site, with deep, rich content, and includes lots of internal links (links going from one page of your site to another page of your site), and you'll increase your odds of earning two listings for the price of one, whatever your position.
September 5, 2009: Properly naming the URLs of the interior pages of your website can have a dramatic impact on SEO. Give your pages URLs that contain your keyword phrases, and separate the words using a dash, not an underscore.
August 25, 2009: Check the incoming links to your website by going to Google and typing links:www.yourwebsitename.com in the search bar. Then go to Yahoo and type link:www.yourwebsitename.com in the search bar.
July 26, 2009: To check out the markup validity of your HTML coding, visit www.validator.w3.org.
June 28, 2009: Google has never seen 25-30% of the searches that are being conducted today - they are new phrases that someone invented, typically 4-5 word combinations. To capture those new phrases, and others, put lots of words on your pages.
June 7, 2009: Deep, varied content is what will get you a lot of clicks. A 20-page site will get twice as many clicks as a 10-page site; a 500-word web page will get twice as many clicks as a 250-word web page. The wider you spread your net with good content, the more people you'll capture.
May 25, 2009: Check Your Google "Cache" Date Want to know when Google last came and looked at your site? Go to Google, and in the search bar, type this: cache:www.yoursitename.com. You'll see a copy of your web page, and in the top bar, you'll see the last time the site was indexed. The more often you add to and update your site, the more often Google will come by.
May 15, 2009: Links, Resources, Partners Google has become so wary of "links farming" (the unscrupulous practice of selling or trading links to trick the search engines) that it's now become suspicious of web pages that are called "Links," "Resources," or "Partners." If you have to use one of those appellations for a page title, don't put a bunch of outgoing links on the page, with no explanatory copy in between, or you'll look suspicious yourself.
May 5, 2009: Privacy Policy Page Google likes to see privacy policy pages on sites. This doesn't have to be a 5,000-word document, just a few sentences telling visitors whether you're capturing their personal and private information and what you intend to do with it. |