Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimisation is a cost effective and proven marketing method for a small business. A small business has budgetary constraints that can often prevent them from investing in expensive marketing campaigns using traditional methods of advertising. Search engine optimisation can be particularly beneficial due to its cost effectiveness along with a high return on investment. It has lower costs than traditional advertising mediums and as such can be used effectively by small businesses. It offers a cost effective method for small businesses to make their website known to a vast audience. Search engine optimisation commonly known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become crucial in the success of small businesses today. Many marketing studies have shown that online marketing is replacing traditional mediums as the primary source for customers to obtain information on a company's products and services. Recent changes in consumer behaviour have made E-Commerce more important than traditional high street retail in many industries.

Search engine marketing has a special significance for small businesses as it allows a business to reduce its marketing and operating costs. The cost benefits and return on investment is significant compared to traditional methods of marketing such as TV, radio or print mediums. Search engine marketing also has a wider reach and can be equally effective whether you wish to market to a local or international customer base.

Search engines provide small businesses with an opportunity to compete with established businesses and they are not limited by a smaller bricks and mortar presence. Small businesses with an effective online marketing strategy have continued to grow and gain competitive advantage over others in their industry. This would not be possible using traditional marketing mediums which have much higher costs associated with it.

The ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is to drive targeted traffic form search engines to the company's website. Websites that receive a high rank on search engines are able to grow and expand due to increased sales and leads achieved as a direct result of increased visibility on search results. A majority of the internet users use search engines to find products and services. Websites that rank high on search engines are able to receive highly targeted traffic from potential customers.

There is tough competition to rank high on search engines as only 10 websites can appear on the first page for a given search phrase. Research shows that if a Web site does not rank on the first page of a search result, chances of generating any traffic to the website is reduced manifold. Therefore it is important for a business to have an ongoing strategy that can help it achieve a first page rank on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Here are some search engine optimisation tips that a small business or company can use to improve its rank on search engines

• A search engine friendly Web site. A website that has been designed with search engines in mind tends to rank higher on search engines. A search engine friendly website can get indexed by search engines with ease and as such it promotes better ranking of its pages. A professional web designer will always ensure that the website is designed with search engine guidelines. A number of techniques can ensure this. Any professional web designer should take these factors into account.
  
  
• Well Organised structure of the website. The information on the website should be organised properly. Information should be categorised meaningfully and content should be appropriately categorised into different sub pages of the website. If users fail to find what they want immediately, they are likely to go to another site.
  
  
• Positioning of keywords. One of the first steps of an effective SEO campaign is to identify the right keywords. Once this is done the keywords should be positioned strategically within the content of the website. The main keywords should be in the title, description and within the body, ideally once in the first sentence.
  
  
• Strategic distribution of keywords on the website. This is a basic SEO technique. Position keywords or key phrases at the start and the end of the document as the beginning and end of a page are given more weight by search engines while searching.
  
  
• Keyword relevancy and density within the web page content. It is important that the website relevancy to keywords is good. The overall website should be related to the main keywords the site is targeting. Keyword density refers to the number of times the keyword appears in the content of a particular web page. E.g. a density of around 2-5% is considered appropriate.
  
  
• Keywords in anchor text of links. Including your main keywords in anchor text of links is a very effective search engine optimisation technique. Keywords should form a part of the link text where possible. Link text is the clickable word that is used to get to a page. Instead of using "Click here for more info" as your link text, use the main keywords instead. This improves the chances of the destination page ranking high for the keyword.

Read more: http://www.webdesign.org/web/site-maintenance/se-optimization/top-seo-tips-for-a-small-business.16959.html#ixzz0Sky7C3SU

People want to have expertise on it, so they will make money (because of most of blogger that study SEO because want to make money online). SEO is a drug. Therefore, there is out of date or invalid SEO advice getting around, not to mention the information that could also make our pages being banned.

Thus, I decided to scratch my head and then compiling the heap of sentences into one single article regarding SEO that most of you have seen all the times. If there so many people have known about what I am going to show why am I still posting this? Because I get nothing to do in this dawn, thus I blog about it!

I hope this tips are not boring you but could assist assist my readers in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.

SEO speaking, when it comes to drive traffic from Search Engines, our minds would immediately recommend two giant search engines, which are Google and Yahoo! The rest of SE, bring me..hmm... just very and very little traffic, thus I don't spend time to much on strategies for them.

Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.

This post only highlights about Google and Yahoo!, the two will bring a fat traffic and a fat traffic means money!

Basic SEO

1. Put the descriptive keyword within title tag, this will make search engine robots recognize your page quickly and know what the content is all about. Title tag is located on head tags, therefore insert descriptive keyword or key phrase that describe on your pages, this way your chances to gain targeted traffic will be a lot bigger.

Not to forget, be sure the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. Because they will be appeared in a search result page (s).

2. When you make an anchor text to link your page from different page or different blogs, make sure the anchor text is the same with text of your title tag. This is very useful if you have many pages or linked by many others blogs.

3. Another recommended way is the text you put within the title tag must also be put within the body of the page. It will be weird if text of title page are not found in the body of the page.

By this every reader that clicks on your page that appears in SERP will be ensured that they clicked on the accurate link and landed at the page where they seek to visit. Robots love this because of there's relevance between the title of the page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Make sure you Do not utilize the same title tag on every page on your website. This way, your pages will be likely not get indexed or crawled because of SE Robots will think that all of the pages are the same.

I often use the headline of my pages as my title tag, this is meant to assist the robots knows quicker and exactly what my page is all about. The most good place to add the headline is in the h1 tag to make it the same as the title tag tex.

5. I said it before and will say it again now, DO NOT SPAM the description or meta tag keyword by stuffing meaningless keywords. All SEO experts are in one voice that this kind of technique is no longer effective.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. DO not use doorway pages. Since search engines like to crawl visitor friendly homepage/subpage that contains relevant content to the keywords searched in SE, therefore DO not use doorway pages, because they are designed only for robots, not for visitors.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Use the alt tag to gives description of our images. Alt tag will assist robots that crawl your images to find specific pages in your site and consequently help SE user who use text only while Googling.

10. Build one-way link at the proper amount to help your page/homepage position in SE.

Search engine optimization [SEO] is an absolute necessity if you want your site to be easily found on the internet. By properly preparing your site you will make it easier to be located thru a search by anyone looking for the type of information, service, or product your site offers.

In order for you to best optimize your site there are 4 areas you'll need to pay special attention to. This optimization process basically involves the correct use of keywords, site labeling, content, and linking with other sites.

Let's have a look at 4 key components you'll need to address to optimize your site for the search engines:

1 - Title tag

This field should be kept short (55 - 60 characters) and should describe the main theme, intention, or content of what the site is all about. What you put here is what will show in the top bar of the window when the site is displayed. It is also the 'title' that appears when it is displayed in any search engine results.

It is important to accurately describe the site content in your title so as to not confuse the search engines. If inaccurate the title may cause you to not be listed at all in any search results.

2 - Keyword use

The use of keywords throughout the text of your site content is important so that the search engines can easily locate your site. These keywords will act as 'guiding lights' for search engine spiders when seeking particular content. If your keywords are not relevant to the site content you again risk a lower search ranking or not one at all.

Be sure your keyword selection reflects your sites content. Also take time to research the popularity of the keywords selected since the most searched upon keywords will not only bring you more traffic but will also boost your search engine ranking.

3 - Keyword density

Once you've selected the keywords you want to build your site around it is best to utilize them within the content in a natural and flowing way. You DO NOT want to overuse any words or phrases since it won't sound right to anyone reading the content. In addition any deliberate overuse will get you penalized by the search engines for 'keyword stuffing' resulting in lower rankings. It's best to stay within a 2% to 3 % range of keyword use within your content.

4 - Inbound links

These links also referred to as link popularity reflects links that come from other websites. This generally is an indication of the relevancy and quality your site content may have to the other websites. Think of this as your online list of references that will vouch for your websites legitimacy.

These links will appear over time or as a result of particular marketing techniques you may utilize. Social tagging, article marketing, and leaving comments at forums or blogs will accelerate your link creation efforts. The more links you develop the bigger boost your search engine ranking will receive.

As you can see search engine optimization isn't exactly rocket science and does in fact appear quite logical. The need to correctly complete this process however is vital in creating a greater awareness for your website with the search engines. If done right you will have a website that's easily found with a high ranking in the search engine results.

People in all walks of life wanted to get the most from things they have 'Imagine a car' In order for someone to get most out of its speed you have to modify it and change some things from it do this so it would be better than the standard production line. Then there are those botanists who do things with fruits say a grape vine to produce the most juicy, sweet grapes you can taste. In order to maximize the potential of something you will have to 'tweak' it. Or in other words you will optimize it. According to eLook.org optimization means 'getting the most out of (something); modifying to achieve maximum efficiency of (something)'. Say, you want to advertise whether it is something you want to sell or you just want to be plainly heard or you want to promote something, one of the ways if not the best way to promote them is through the web.

S.E.O - Search Engine Optimization

If someone wants to find something in the web, they will go to their Search Engine (Google, Yahoo!, MSN live, Netscape) and type their key words and a bunch of sites will pop up. The common practice of viewers/surfers will take over and will then click the top spot, if that does not satisfy them, they will click on the second one and so on - Now if you are the one promoting such things, of course, you want your site to be the ones they visit, so in order for people to visit your page, you have to be on those top spots. That's where Search Engine Optimization or SEO comes in.

SEO is the process that will take your page to get to that top spot. Simply put Search Engine Optimization will give you more visitors as you rank high in those search engines.

Basics of SEO

Search Results will be presented in two forms - One is what is called 'The Sponsored Links' (these are paid ads, and pays the search engine money for their space), and the other one the natural search results which is in rank order (the top being the most visited). Search Engine Optimization will deal mostly with what we call as natural search results.

Search engines will have different methods of ranking up the search results (so for example the term that you entered in Google at times will give different sites that will pop up in Yahoo!)

Another thing that has more impact on Search Engine Optimization is the 'term' - it is the word you used to start your search. The term will be the deciding factor in which your SEO will be ranked up against other websites.

Uses of Search Engine Optimization

The most basic use of SEO is of course in advertising. Advertising means you want something to be sold. Simply put most of the things are better in numbers - so the more people visit your website, the more chances that you will sell things that you offer. And as web-users go, they will click on the top results of their searches before going to another page of results (if they even bother), thus Search Engine Optimization greatly enhances your probability of transaction Another use is when you want to be heard, there are terms or things that people search other than consumer things. As seen in the above example when your site is staring at them in the face as soon as they click their mouse or hit the 'Enter' button, again SEO will give you better chance of conveying your idea on whomever search for the things you want to be heard!!!

An HTML tag that is used to define the top line of a web browser, the search engine considers this as the most important part of text on the web page, as they base their natural results here.

Title tag optimization

There is not a single webpage in the top rankings that does not include their main keyword in their title tags. A web page may not use the keyword in their main body instead they use inbound links to rank well, but still in the title tag it is very critical to include it. There are several things to consider for title tag optimization:

1. Important keywords must appear in the title tag

2. Title tags should not exceed the length of 60 characters and must have only 7 to 10 words

3. It should be easily read by the web-surfer (user- friendly)

4. Stop words must be used sparingly and avoid dead weight words altogether if possible

5. Keywords must be as close together as possible (keyword proximity)

6. Put the keywords as close to the title tag's beginning as possible

7. Proper word order of the title tag must be maintained

8. Repeating the keyword in the title tag should be very limited

Important keywords in the title tag

Title tag optimization requires that the most important keyword be placed in the title tag. Search engines are geared to look for keywords in the title tag that is why it is very critical that they are here. Title tag is also the part that web-surfers browse in the search results to see if the thing that they are looking for is somehow in that page. It is also a good idea not to put irrelevant words to your title tags so as not to dilute them in the search results, whereas, it is more advisable to include some more of your keywords instead.

Length of the title tag

Optimized title tags never exceed this length because some search engines will chop off the phrases over their limit. User-friendly

Though title tag optimization requires your title tags to be search engine friendly, but your main target are the web-surfers. Title tags must be made as very simple and as easily understood as you can.

Stop words/ dead weight words

Dead weight words (i.e. Home page, web, web page) are ignored by the search engine spiders, and though the stop words are also ignored (i.e. the, is, of, that, is, etc), you still need some of them for your title tags to be easily understood Keyword Proximity

Search engines ranks webpage who have their keywords that is very close to each other and has almost no stop words between them. Near the beginning

Title tag optimization encourages that your keywords be near the beginning of the title, as the search engine do their search pattern in a linear order (top to bottom, left to right). Word Order

Most of the time people input their keywords in the proper order so it is a good idea to follow the proper word order (i.e. Mitsubishi Lancer is better than Lancer Mitsubishi) Repetition of Keywords

Do not repeat keywords. Not only does it look ridiculous there is not a single top ranking web page that have them.