All About Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of developing the most favorable means to gain quality internet user traffic to a website through search results from online search engines. Usually, the higher a webpage is marked in search engine results, the higher ranked it is causing more searchers to visit that site. Website owners can use this to their advantage to market their sites, in turn getting free traffic from users who are looking for specific products or information.
How do I get started?
To get started, you must submit your site to search engines. Doing so will let the search engines know that your site exists. They can then include your site when crawling the web for searched content. Be sure to submit your site to as many search engines as possible, especially the big ones. Be patient, it may take a couple of weeks before your site shows up. Here are a few search engines worth submitting to:
- Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
- Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
- Windows Live/MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
- AOL/The Open Directory Project: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
- Ask: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#18
There are also some websites out there that can do your site submission for you. Some are free; others require registration or a fee. They will include a bunch of smaller search engines too. Do a little search and see who comes up. Whatever you decide to do, be sure to submit your site to each search engine only ONCE! Any more than that may be a cause for your site to be banned.
How does search engine optimization work for my site?
Search engines are robots that send “spiders” to web pages to crawl them for content. Therefore, you must consider what keywords people are searching for and how a search engine works. Here is a list of things to try:
- Provide new, fresh and unique content daily. Keep your visitors and search engines interested.
- Be sure to have keywords and phrases in your content. Make sure they match the actual sites content.
- Devise a linking strategy. Link to other sites and have them link back to you.
- Check each webpage and be sure you keywords and meta tags are consistent with your sites overall theme/message. Find out what keywords are the most searched for.
- Submit articles to ezines and provide a back link. This will accomplish two major things: Free advertising to your website and more back links equals higher rank with search engines
- Hire an SEO Company. If your budget permits, get the pros to do the work for you.
Search engines are always updating and tweaking their algorithms, or search engine methods, to stay unique, steer clear of scammers and provide the best and most relevant results for their internet searchers. Keep this in mind as you go along: what works for your site today may not in the next 3 months. Continuously update your site and see what keywords will work the best for you.
