What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of modifying the content of your web page so that it is easier for your target audience to find your website when they search the web using a search engine. When someone goes to a search engine like Google or MSN, they'll type in a search phrase. When they click that search button the search engine serves up a list of results, usually ten. If the web surfer doesn't like the first ten results, there will be a button to see more results. However, most people are going to find a link to a site that looks good to them on the first or second page of results. If you want you can buy a sponsored link that appears on the top of the list of results, or on the side, but that can add up to a lot of money. Another approach is to try to optimize your web pages so that they naturally appear in the first ten links returned by the search engine.
Important Factors that Impact Placement
There are lots of search engines out there. The biggest ones are Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. Each one has it's own method of indexing pages and figuring out in what order those pages should be presented to the web surfer doing the search. The most important thing is that the search engines know about your site and include your pages in their index. If they don't, you'll never show up no matter what you do.
Getting indexed by search engines
Most major search engines provide a page where you can go to submit your website or a particular web page for indexing. For example, here is Google's submit page:
Submit your website to Google for indexing
(Some people beleive that Google no longer processes submissions)
Submit your website to Yahoo for indexing
Submit your website to MSN for indexing
A second way you can get your page indexed is to have a link to your page added to a page that is already indexed. Once search engines index a site they periodically revisit that site and crawl through all of it's pages and links. When the search engine sees a link to your site it will "discover" you, and start crawling your site.
Getting indexed by search enginesBefore you submit your website, make sure your web pages are search engine friendly. Follow the link below for some tips on how to make your web page easy for search engines to index and understand what your page is about:
How do I optimize my web site? Making your website Search Engine Friendly
Relevancy vs. Page Rank
It's one thing to have your page indexed, it's another to appear at the top of the search engine results. Following the tips above on how to make your website search engine friendly will help, but it's not enough. The tips above will tell search engines that your page is RELEVANT to the phrase being searched for, but it won't tell search engines how good the QUALITY of the content is. Search engines measure quality as a numerical score, refered to by Search Engine Optimization experts as Page Rank, a phrase started by Google and now widely adopted. Search engines try to find the most relevant content of the highest quality to satisfy the needs of the person doing the search. So how does the search engine determine the quality of your content? A big part of that is how many people link to your web page. When pages link to your page, that's an indication to the search engine that someone thinks the content of your page is interesting and important. The search engine indexing will also consider how important the site is that is pointing to your site. A link from a very important site to your site is more important than several links to your site from other sites that are not considered so important.
Next steps
Now that you understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization, you're probably interested in taking steps to get your pages optimized and get the best page rank you can. It's going to take some time and some effort, but it can certainly be done. I recommend that you use a RSS News Reader and subscribe to this blog, so you can read the other articles I've written on the subject and receive new articles as I release them. You're going to need to:
- Create search engine friendly pages
- Promote your pages to improve your page rank
Do it yourself or hire an SEO specialist?
You can either do the optimization yourself or hire an SEO specialist. It depends on what kind of time you have, if you have a budget to spend on this, what tools you have and what your technical skills are. There are several aspects to the SEO process, and you can do some of them yourself and outsource other activities to other people. The important thing to understand is that setting up your pages is important, but promoting those pages to get good page rank is an ongoing marketing activity. Someone needs to create your website with search engine friendly pages, or modify your existing website to make it search engine friendly. After you have done that, you'll need to follow the advice in my other blog posts to see how you can promote your site's page rank.
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