Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization Success

Search engines are the starting point for most people when they’re looking for something on the Internet. This is why the most popular web sites are search engines and web portals with search functions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves making web pages more search engine friendly to promote them as the most highly ranked on the search engine listings.

The improvements can mean the difference between achieving top rankings, which can result in thousands of monthly visitors, and being lost in cyberspace. All too often SEO is an after-thought for most web site owners and web designers.

SEO should play a major part of a web marketing strategy, even before the site is built. You should incorporate SEO in the planning stage, during the design process and after the site is launched.

Search engine optimization must play a major part in the following areas:

• Domain name
• Page content
• Site structure
• Site design
• Site topics
• Headings
• Sub-headings
• Links
• Site usability

Successful search engine optimization is basically about following the search engines’ rules. If your web page fits the criteria that the search engines are looking for in determining the most relevant web page for a search query, they will reward you with a top ranking.

Our expert staff of search engine optimizers modify web pages on an ongoing basis to fit these criteria. They give web pages a better chance of being selected by the search engines as the most relevant page for a particular search query.

How To Target The Right Keywords For Top Rankings

Keyword phrases are the most important factor in achieving high search engine rankings. Other factors such as link popularity, web site theme, the number and quality of competing pages, also contribute to a web page’s search engine ranking. There is a long list of criteria that is ever-changing and only the search engines themselves know exactly what the criteria are.

If you study search engine optimization techniques, you will soon realize that the majority of the optimization strategies involve the keywords contained within a web page, in one form or another.

What Is Keyword Frequency?

Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword phrase appears within a page. Generally, the more times a keyword phrase appears within a page, the more relevant the page is for that keyword. But search engines will penalize a web site that overdoes keyword frequency. Search engines call this keyword stuffing.

What Is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is the ratio of targeted keywords contained within the total number of words on a page. For example, if a page has 100 words in total and of those 100 words 3 words are your targeted keywords, then the keyword ratio is 3%.

What Is Keyword Prominence?

Keyword prominence is the concept that keywords placed near the beginning of a web page are given more weight than the keywords on the rest of the page.

What Is Keyword Proximity?

Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords
are, the better.

Why You Must Add Important Keywords To The Title Tag

Major search engines give a great deal of relevance to keywords in the TITLE tag. Therefore, you should always include your most important keywords within the Title tag on all optimized pages.

Why You Must Add Important Keywords To Headline Tags

Major search engines place a deal of relevance on keywords in headline tags. Therefore you should always sprinkle keyword rich headline tags throughout a web page, starting with the largest headline tag and working through your subheads.

Basic Search Engine Optimization Techniques

In this section, you will read about basic search engine optimization techniques that are fundamental for search engine success.

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are hidden HTML tags used to describe the contents of a web page. There are numerous meta tags, but for search engine optimization purposes I will only concentrate on the two most influential meta tags; the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag.

Here is a sample set of meta tags:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>page title goes here</TITLE>
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”page description goes here.”>
<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc.”>
</HEAD>
<BODY>

What Is A Meta Description Tag?

Most search engines extract the contents of the Meta description tag to use as the search result description. Google, AllTheWeb, AltaVista and Inktomi extract the contents of the Meta description tag to use as the description in its search results.

So we highly recommend including a keyword-rich meta description tag in every optimized web page. If the meta description tag is missing, the search engine will usually extract a description from the first couple of lines of the main body text.

The description should be descriptive and sell the page to search engine users, so they click on your link. We put major effort into creating descriptions that are keyword-rich and enticing to search engine users.

What Is A Meta Keywords Tag?

The contents of a meta keywords tag is used to help define the important keyword phrases in a web page. While this sounds good in theory, in practice the meta keywords tag is often misused by webmasters who stuff it with excessive or irrelevant keywords. As a result most search engines now discount the contents of the meta keywords tag.

What Are Site Maps?

Site maps are visual models of a site’s content that allows visitors to find specific content. Like an interactive table of content, links lead to the most important topics on a site. Site maps are organized hierarchically, breaking down the site’s information into increasingly specific subject areas.

Site maps also help search engines find, crawl and index all the pages in a web site. As such, we recommend creating a site map for many sites.

How Does Link Popularity Influence Higher Rankings?

Link popularity refers to the number and quality of links pointing to a web page. It is an extremely important method of improving your site’s relevancy in search engines.

The logic behind link popularity is broken down into two parts:

1. Quantity of Links – A link from site A to site B is a in effect a recommendation.

2. Quality of Links – A link from an authoritative site carries more weight than one from an unknown site.

What Is Site Popularity?

Site popularity refers to click through popularity, and how long visitors remain at the site after getting there. Do not confuse site popularity with link popularity. Link popularity refers to the number and quality of links pointing back to a web site.

How To Submit To Search Engines

It is vital that you let the search engines know your web site exists. Because if they don’t know your web site exists, you have no hope of getting indexed by them.

There are two ways to get your site onto the search engine radar:

1. Submit your web pages directly.

2. Let the search engines find your web pages via links from web pages already crawled and indexed by the search engines. Lately this has become the most effective method. This is because most search engines now rely on finding sites via links from other web sites already in their index.

How Long Does It Take To Get Indexed?

Once you have submitted your site to the search engines, it may take up to eight weeks or more, depending on the search engine, for your site to begin to appear in the search results.

Why Does It Take So Long?

It takes search engines that long to crawl and index the billions of pages on the web. In addition, some of the major search engines receive up to several hundred thousand submissions a day.

A lot of people do not understand why it takes so long for their site to get indexed. They get impatient after a few weeks of not being able to find their site in the search engines. As a result, they resubmit their site again and again in the hope of speeding up the indexing process. This does not speed up the indexing process. You must be patient when it comes to the search engines. You either play by their rules, or not at all. In fact, it can take up to a year or more to achieve significant first page rankings for some web sites.

How To Monitor Your Search Engine Rankings

Search engine rankings are a measure of a site’s visibility in the search engines. Being ranked number 50 will not get your site any traffic, as few people ever go beyond the first three pages of search engine results.

How To Monitor Search Engine Rankings Manually

You can find out your search ranking results manually by entering a keyword phrase in a search engine to see where your web pages appear in the rankings. Of course, monitoring your search engine rankings manually is only recommended if you have only a few keyword phrases to check, and a lot of time on your hands.

Every month, we monitor your search engine rankings and deliver ranking reports to you. We can also meet to strategized changes and improvements.

Search Engine Results Do Vary

Various factors affect rankings reported by the search engines. These include time of day, indexing runs, traffic load, load balancing measures, server timeout, ongoing ranking jobs, etc.

Most search engines, such as Google, use multiple databases. So search engine rankings aren’t necessarily 100% accurate, since they only present a snap shot of the rankings at a particular moment in time.