ON-PAGE TECHNIQUES FOR SEO’ING YOUR WEBSITE

Here’s the thing, you spend good money and time putting up a neat piece of a website on the net for one reason and one reason only; to be viewed. If your website doesn’t get visitors then it is, in one word, worthless. But how do you make the people flock to your website like you want them to? Simple - by getting a high ranking with the search engines. How do you do that? You do that by means of easy user-friendly methods like the SEO (search engine optimization).

When you search for a certain something on a search engine hundreds of pages are thrown open to you, but out of these you check not more than the first three. The websites listed on the few hundred other pages which follow therefore go unnoticed and accordingly remain unvisited in spite of being listed by the engine. The left out websites can better there chances of earning a better ranking and getting visited by more users than they can honestly dream of by using SEO, read on to see how you can make it work for you.

Search Engine optimization is an advantageous method by means of which your URL can get the kind of spotlight which will earn it hundreds and thousands of visitors every single day! There are a number of ways of taking advantage of search engine optimization. Consider this; your website consists of a number of pages, what if I say that each of these pages may, individually, be maximized for search engine optimization? Putting to use your search engine technique on every one of your web pages will help you notch up your ranking on the search engines and increase your web traffic manifolds.

Follow the tips below to make SEO work for you.

• Internal Links

Now, search engines have this particular liking for sites with a lot of links on its pages, so make sure you include loads of them on all your pages. Keep the links internal, that is let them link one part of the website to another or one end of the page to the other end and so on. The basic reason for this is to keep your visitor occupied with the site, once they are at it. There is no plausible reason as to why you should encourage your visitors to leave your site by providing external links, keep it in the home front and yet optimize your site for the search engines.

• External Links

Like we just discussed external links in your site is a bad distraction which tends to steal away your visitors and sweep them off to other destinations. As a site owner, therefore, external links can seem a particularly unwelcome topic. But hold on, here is the catch, search engine’s offer higher rankings to sites which have both, external and internal links. Therefore there is no avoiding it, put up a few external links on your site, push them off into the margins of the page or right at the bottom of it, only make sure that you do put it, there’s no getting away from its obvious power.

• Keywords

Optimize all the pages on your site for keywords. Technically your keywords should be present more than thrice on all the pages. For this reason an abundance of content is a good idea, sprinkle your keywords abundantly (but meaningfully and sensibly) within the written body of the site cause, search engine’s, though they cannot read, can and do scan text. If you have optimized each page right then every time a search engine scans your site’s text then your keywords will get detected and you will in turn achieve a higher ranking with it.

PAGERANK: WHAT IS IT AND HOW IS IT ASSIGNED?

It is a known fact that Google assigns every single website page a Google Page rank, which is based on a complicated mathematical algorithm. Pages are ranked on a scale with zero as the lowest and ten as the highest. Interlinking of websites – external as well as inter – holds value so far as Page Rank is concerned.

If the site X links to the site Y, the latter gets credited with a percentage of Site X's Page Rank which kind of gets passed cover to it. The Site X loses nothing so far as Page Rank is concerned – unless and until the link is to a bad neighborhood or a banned area.

An example to understand the situation better. Site X had a Page Rank of 5, there were only 2 outbound links to Site X. One of the outbound Links was intended to brand new Site Y. Brand new Site Y had 4 outgoing links, with NO other Incoming Links, apart from the one from Site X. Google awarded Site Y a Page Rank of 5.

From this example in real life, it is evident that fewer outbound links on a per page basis means a higher Page Rank.

If Site X in the above example had a huge amount of outgoing links on the page, in that case the percentage of Page Rank passed would have been smaller and the New Site Y would have received a lower rank than the equal rank that was passed.

Things to avoid

While engaging in reciprocal linking, make sure you check the amount of outbound links that not only the page has but the overall site as well. Search engines such as Google doesn't like pornography sites, gambling sites and Link Farms that have thousands of links on them. Unless that is your business, don't link to any of those types of sites.

You can lose Page Rank and Search Engine Results if you link to sites that are considered Bad Neighborhoods or are Banned. Be alert and make sure you check before linking. Though sometimes you may not be "punished", you won’t be gaining any benefits and the loss in PR of your site is not at all worth it.

Be aware of which sites the outbound links are linking your site to. Check your outbound links from time to time, ensuring that they are:

1) Still an active website
2) Still a resource for the reason you linked to them in the first place
3) They have not changed formats or the theme and continue to be a quality site.

Page Rank improves over time. Though not very often, Google does update the Page Rank, once in say every four to eight months. So link exchange with like-themed sites or quality sites is the best possible SEO strategy.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING: PLAYING THE GAME

Search engines are faster than you can think. It changes within a blink of an eye. Yes, try writing a book on search engine optimization and it will be outdated even before it gets printed—that’s just to give you an idea as to how fast the rules of the game called search engine marketing changes. So in this high acceleration of change, how do you stay tuned?

The hardest part of search engine marketing is to crack the Google algorithm. All the discussions, debates and research on content optimization, keyword selection, title creation, link exchange and more are all too familiar among the website owners now. And it does seem at times that the search engines elude you and your understanding because the moment you think you caught up with them, you find you are in the same abyss of yesterday, trying to grope the right way out.

The clever search engines keep moving forwards and with some very real reasons, beyond the otherwise ‘sadistic’ ones. In a way, these come down to two simple yet mutually conflicting factors —

• Competition: online businesses are growing everyday, by the minute.

• Expectation: Web-users, today, visit websites with lofty expectations. As it is the search engines that drive them to visit sites, they expect the sites referred thus, to be extremely relevant to their searches.

In a nutshell, it can be safely said that since the online competition is high with so many websites trying to outdo one another and make their mark in the online arena, the search engines are somehow compelled to change their algorithms from time to time to serve its users better with more comprehensively. They, however, do not intend to make things hard for website owners or optimizers; they only change algorithms to provide more accurate and more helpful search results to the users, so that they get the best information even in this highly competitive online business market.

Evidently then, you can see that the search engines are overtly user-centric. And this does give webmasters and search engine marketers the most obvious clue as to what to do to get ahead in the game and stay there too. While it is of course important to keep track of the changing algorithms, you also need to focus on the users, your potential customers, analyze their needs and think of ways to fulfill those through your website. Compared to links and algorithms, you got to concentrate more on user-needs because that is one surefire way to take your search engine marketing at its helm.

Donning this coveted ‘marketing’ label, there are five things that you need to consider now:

• Working with other sites: Much in keeping with the coffee-shop-in-the-bookstore concept, you can fill up the void in another website to benefit both ends. It is quite smart to work with other websites and set up individual businesses in each other’s business space with one symbiotic approach.

• Deep links: It is always essential to take the visitors exactly to what they have been searching for. Using deep links comes in handy here. Therefore, keep deep links for both your organic and paid listings, so that viewers do not have to hunt for what they actually need.

• Publicity pieces: Well-written publicity pieces like articles and press releases allow you to accommodate the important and top search words for your website. But you must also make the piece a good, helpful, informative and interesting read, if you want it to be an effective marketing tool.

• Directories: While choosing business directories, you must go for those having the best custom. Instead of just another plain link, you should be in the look-out for good referrals.

• Anchor links: Anchor texts are links and information that you give out to other websites. Now, getting links is not the supreme objective, it is more important to draw the custom that gives more profit. So you may also spare a thought about using anchor texts that pertain to your users’ needs or to the topics in the page visited.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: THINGS TO DO

When people search for something online, they type the keyword or key phrase in the popular search engines, which give them an extensive list of sites relevant to that search. Now to make your website visible in the first set of search results, it needs to have a good page rank. Search engine optimization is the means to this end, the branch of activity which aims at enhancing this rank of a website with some structured strategies. Most owners of sites invest a fortune and valuable time in creating a web presence, but sadly, they fail to consider the more important aspect — that is, how the website will come to the notice of web-users.

Long back it was just a matter of some time to launch a site — design it, fill it up with nice content and submit it into some directories — it was as simple as that! And search engines would also give good ranking to that website for the keywords featuring in the body-text of the webpage.

And since the number of websites present then were not even half as much of what is there now and since the techniques of optimizing a site in search engines were not as improved, keywords could be repeated along with other otherwise refutable maneuvers like creating many domains with the same content. And this too ensured those sites a good position in the popular search engines.

But things have come a long way from that now. There has been a dramatic change in the search engine marketing scenario. Today, just ordinary designing, content and submission won’t help; the website owner needs to do his homework — study the various types of relevant keywords typed in search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN and then fashion his/her website accordingly so that the website ranks well enough to be viewed by the majority of people. And because today people tend to look for everything online and keep searching for the right goods and services till they find it, the search engine optimization is a big challenge, although with some amount of risk involved.

Now web presence is something very important here. If you are stepping into the online scene, your website needs to have a web presence. If not, you have a disfavor. The search engines, particularly Google, do not prefer giving high ranks to new domains. Position improves with time, as the website becomes old.

So obviously, websites which are older in time and already have a secured web presence, stand a better chance of getting higher ranks in the search engine. Listed below are some of the key factors for achieving the top positions in search engines.

• Clean Codes: All search engines prefer a neatly coded website. When a webpage is designed in MS Word, it generates untidy html code. This is not a good thing. Also, website owners need to be careful about the WYSIWYG editors. Some use proprietary tags in the html and thus become uncongenial to the search engines.

• Content: No saying would suffice for the stupendous importance of proper content that helps a website to score high in the search engines. Content is the backbone for any site. Search engines often look for relevant keywords or phrases in the body text of a webpage to identify those with the searched words/phrases. If found, your website is considered relevant for those keywords and you can expect a pretty good rank.

• Tags: Yet another very vital aspect in html coding is the tag—the title tags and meta-description tags. To give your website a decent search engine position, these tags must contain the relevant keywords which you think users will look for.

• Linking: Simply put, linking means other websites linking to your website. Now how would that help, you ask? This is good for your website precisely because the search engines consider each related link on your site as a given “vote”. The logic is easy — if site X links to site Y, it obviously follows that site Y is of some value or worthy of it. These links can either come from important directories like Yahoo! or Dmoz, or from other related websites. For instance, if your website promotes clothes, a link from a fashion house’s website would be relevant and count as a good vote in search engine parameters. However, exchanging links with questionable sites like link farms is not appreciated. Link farms are considered worthless in the sense that these are directories that just collect links without any valuable content in them. So whenever you add links to your website, ensure that those links have your targeted keywords in their anchor text. Post articles or mention elaborately about your product and services is and then include links to your site. There are many important sites which post articles and appreciate sites with good content. So you may also popularize your website by putting up online press releases there. However, it takes a lot of effort, patience, time, skill and money to achieve the desired position in search engines for particular keywords. But when the results start showing, you will know that it is worth the wait.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: THINGS YOU SHOULD AVOID

Search engine optimization can be done in many ways, but some of these are considered unethical. If used, this may result in a ban on your website or can even invite several other penalties from the search engine authorities. More than helping you to raise the rank for your website in search engines, some such strategies can spell plain disaster instead. So it is important to know what to avoid while optimizing your website for search engine rankings.

Text in graphics

Text inside images and graphics cannot be tracked by search engines. So even if you use significant keywords and relevant texts within the graphics, it fails to contribute to search engine positioning in any way. Information, words and texts should be placed in a way such that the search engines can easily identify them and thereby give your website a better rank for those search results. More the text in graphics in a webpage, lesser its chances of being noticed and getting good rank in search engines. Failing to identify graphic texts, the search engines often deduce these as blank web-pages. Homepages are classic examples of this, they being graphic intensive and incorporating texts in images.

Moving a page having a PR

Moving a webpage means making it lose its Page Rank (PR) until Google indexes it next. So if you are to shift the page, redirect its original URL to the new page, mentioning whether the translocation is temporary or for good.

Dead ends

Every webpage must have a link exit, a way out of that page. No webpage should be a closed road.

Artificially increase a page's keyword density

Stuffing a webpage with unnecessary words in order to heighten its keyword density is a major unethical attempt, which leads to severe penalizations at times. When ALT tags are stuffed with keywords, users do not get to view it and that is precisely what is held as a wrong strategy towards search engine optimization. So fend it off.

Using hidden text or links

Hiding texts and links from the users’ view is yet another significant red-flag point for search engine optimizers. Only those texts and links that are clearly viewable should be used.

Links from link farms and non-relevant sites

When you are using other related links in your webpage, it is best to ensure that they are of relevant sites and not of FFA sites or link farms. One simple way is to use links from pages that do not have many other links, from websites having the same theme and content as yours or from those that complement yours.

Unnatural links

Natural links always have an edge over unnatural links when it comes to positions in search engines, because the latter prefer linking to be ‘natural’—to appear spontaneous, as if they are natural results of a business deal. To do away with unnatural linking, avoid too many links at a time, avoid links all coming from link pages, avoid all reciprocal links and all links having a high PR 95 or above). This way you can save throwing an impression that you bought the links.

Using the same text in all incoming links

If every website that links back to you bears the same text on the link description, it is considered unnatural. More natural is to allow some percent of the site’s name in the text and the rest a wide range of description. This link text description plays a crucial role in determining the site/page rank. So it is surely advisable to carry this in mind while you fix your preferred link text description in your website.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND KEYWORDS

The online arena is growing at a rapid pace every single day and has come to become a platform where you can get it all from tattoo designs to passport generation forms. And all those familiar with the internet, know this all to well. Making business online is the talk of the day and many entrepreneurs are just encashing this increasing demand for products and services online. Today’s people buy and sell a lot over the world wide web, but to get enough dough from your site and to make it a success, you got to attract people to your shop, that is, your website.

Now, if you thought that’s anyways easy, you got to rethink. Much contrary to what you thought, this is not at all easy to achieve and it does take up a whole lot of thinking and planning. With so many websites competing today to attract web-users to their domain, it becomes all the more challenging to make them come to your website first and avail your services or products. In a medium as fast and advanced as the internet, you have to really work hard to stand out in the crowd and take the cake.

It is practically impossible to be unaware of the word “search engine” for someone who uses the internet. Every internet user has gone to a search engine at some point of time or the other. Whenever you are looking for something, say for instance, customized golf bags. What you do is simple—you just go to any of those leading search engines and type your required item on the search box. And there you are with a huge list of websites that offer you all you want to know about customized golf bags.

Now usually with a plethora of websites right before you, you tend to click on the first link in the result page. That is the most common impulse. Websites which rank low and appear in the twelfth or thirteenth page in the search engine, they are unlikely to get any user to visit their site. So of course, being a website owner, you would want your website to come right at the top of the first page or at least somewhere in the first page.

This is exactly what search engine optimization helps you achieve. The search engines primarily keep hunting for one thing in a webpage—the keywords. It is these keywords that act as a gateway to your site because people can find your site by typing these keywords in search engines. Hence, selecting and incorporating the right keywords in the right amount is extremely important. For this, you first need to decide on the keywords that you think web-users would type to get to your site, the ones you are going to integrate in the body of your website.

Know your site well. What is your site all about? If it is a site on sports, keywords can be words like ‘games’, ‘play’, ‘player’, ‘sports goods’, ‘sports clubs’, sports news’, ‘matches’ and many more. It is very important to choose good keywords—keywords that are mostly typed in search engines. However, it is always wise to choose simple keywords which have minimum or zero chances of being misspelled. Now once you have decided on the keywords for your website, you are one step up towards optimizing your site for search engine ranking.

But even that would not suffice and assure you a good search engine position. Identifying the right keywords for your site is a great start, but there still remains a lot to be done. Of course you want all your chosen keywords and all other relevant keywords to appear on the site. Well, that is fine as long as you know how to go about it and what the search engines want. It is often hard to please the search engines, for these are too clever and keep looking for very specific aspects in a webpage.

The keywords must always feature within the body-text of a website. But you should not just keep repeating the same keywords over and over again. Filling up pages with excessive unnecessary keywords is considered an unjust effort by search engines and the value of your website crumbles automatically. In this, chances of getting a high listing are nil. For high ranking, your website must have lots of content and relevant text.

SEO: THE DO-IT-YOURSELF WAY

If you have a website you obviously want people to see it. You want visitors to pour in and help make your business rewarding. You want customers help you to slowly expand your little business to a larger and more popular one and you would do just about anything to see that happen…pay hefty sums for advertising, compose hundreds and hundreds of articles for ezines, get top notch SEO services to put you up on popular search engines….only you probably don’t have the kind of time or money to do any of those. Relax that needn’t end your dreams of making your site popular, you can still get the sort of mileage either of those options would provide you without pumping in the sort of money or time they would demand.

Welcome the D.I.Y method of SEO into your business and watch how it makes your ambitions work out for you.

Now, we have all grown to realize the benefits SEO can provide to our online business, but we have also realized, at various junctures, exactly what it costs us to earn that sort of benefit. Most SEO services charge you any where around a neat $4000 for optimizing only a few pages of your site and ranking just two or three of your site’s key words/phrases. The present rate for internal SEO work ranges between $40-$60/hour. External work can cost anywhere over $100/hour. If you own a small business or are a solopreneur then you know paying so much will shake up your entire bank balance.

Even if you are a part of a larger establishment you should probably know that if all the SEO responsibilities of the company’s site is taken over by an individual employee or a group of employees, then it will allow a lot of the company’s revenues to be saved, a boon for a company which fails to make the expected amount of profits by a narrow margin.

SEO companies are withholding a big secret from you. What they aren’t telling you is that earning good ranks at a search engine is really quite a simple job. And once you earn it you can settle there comfortably because all you will need then is a little maintenance and tweaking to help you stay there.

So you can put your site up on a search engine and also get a good ranking without anybody else’s help. Get yourself one of those easily available (and affordable) SEO guides, or land yourself a membership or software package on one of those sites online and learn the tricks which the swanky SEO company’s keep flashing in front of your face.

That is not to suggest that learning them will be a cake walk! Well wake up and smell the coffee….of course they won’t. But if you have a basic understanding of technical matters and a little wit to spare then you can have your website on its way up on the search engine result pages in less than two weeks.

But here is a little thing you must know if you intend to make SEO work for you all by yourself. Most of us who begin on SEO the D.I.Y way learn the tricks and techniques real well but then goof up when it comes to implementing them. That’s because most of us don’t have a plan of action. Now, when you are fighting a war (and believe me competition on the internet is a sort of war in itself) you have to have a plan of action and you have to see it through. Same goes for your SEO plan.

As search engine’s will be made more and more advanced with the coming years, marketing through them will only grow bigger and bigger. In the mean time all you have to know is whether you are willing to sacrifice good money on SEO services which gives you little or no benefit and yet charge sky high rates or whether you, as an enterprising individual, are ready to take the challenge of SEO’ing on your own capable shoulders and thereby determine your own fate for yourself, without the financial loss. The choice is yours.

SEO COMPANIES: HOW TO SELECT AN AFFORDABLE ONE

Search Engine Optimization has helped millions of people to get more people to visit their websites and thereby increased their earnings manifolds. If you want to make use of SEO methods for your website you can either put it to use by yourself, or you can take professional help. The first step towards implementing SEO on your website would be to augment your site’s search engine ranking. This in itself is an intricate process and requires time and effort, if you are willing to invest a good amount of both on a regular basis then by all means do it yourself. But if you are wary about executing SEO methods on your own and think you do not possess the required expertise or do not have the sort of time it requires don’t fret, a number of affordable SEO company’s are eager to be of service, all you have to do is get in touch with them.

If you have a website which is already up and running, but is not providing you with the sort of money you expected it to an SEO implementation would be a good move for you. Your present lack of funds might keep your from investing the kind of money topnotch SEO services require you to, but there are other ways of making it work for you. A number of companies and individuals offer SEO services for a modest price, but you need to scan through your options before deciding the one which will work for you. Don’t jump the gun and hire the first company/individual you find, you may live to regret such a rash decision. Instead, take some time to conduct your own background checks and research, spend time comparing possible options and only then decide which SEO service will be right for you.

If you are searching for someone else to implement SEO for you then chances are that you don’t really know how it works. Make sure you tutor yourself to know at least the basics of the service before trying to hire somebody, else you will end up being taken on a ride. The internet is a place where quality service people and crooks are packed together so close that it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other, so while most SEO company’s are legal we would be foolish to deny that there are a lot of people out there waiting to swindle you. The more ignorant you are about the work you need done the easier you are to swindle.

After you have decided on a few options and running a back check on them remember to ask for feedback. If the company you are dealing with has a creditable work background it will not hesitate to provide you with references to check up on. Every professional company should provide you with the sort of background information which you as a potential customer might want, without having to be asked for it. But in case they don’t even then make sure you don’t forget to demand it. Once you get the feedback run your own search through search engine’s to see whether their work has made the claimed difference to the former user’s links.

Although you are making use of a service which asks for a modest amount in the form of fee do not allow yourself to accept anything besides quality service. Remember the reason you are paying as much or as little as you are for the service is because the service costs that much, therefore there is no reason why you should let someone use the low costs as an excuse for poor quality.

Affordable SEO services are easily available and a wise and effective idea for website owners who wish to step up their profits. However a little effort needs to be invested to make even the most brilliant of ideas work, so don’t slacken up about the research and back check part. Once you are truly satisfied with a company put your SEO responsibilities in their hands and watch your website earn you a fortune.

THE GOOGLE CACHE AND WHY YOU SHOULD AVOID IT

Sites usually make superhuman efforts to get all possible pages into Google to increase their page rank. In so far as Google cache is considered, this tactic can and does sometimes return to haunt websites, especially those sites that sell products.

Google Cache – What is it?

Google makes a copy of every web page it can get its little spider robot on. And it stores the copies of these pages in a cache. The cache is nothing but a copy of each and every previous web page for the concerned link. When you are searching on Google for something, each result that the search returns has a "cached" button at the end of the link. Click the "cached" link and you will see a previous copy of the page. Often, what you see is an older version of the page.

In case you are an online seller of products, would you seriously want Google to keep copying previous pages and making them available? Look at it by putting on another pair of lens - do you really want customers to see the old prices of the products you are selling? Many sites change prices or information during the year by way of reflecting their selling cycles, among other things. If your current prices of July are at their top point, would you want your customers to click on the cache link and see your lower prices from April? Probably not.

Don't Get Cached!

It is really simple to keep Google and other search engines from taking copies of your pages. All it needs is some careful meta tagging, and nothing more nor difficult.

All search engine robots that rely on meta tags must stop taking copies of your site. Of late, YahooSlurp was seen behaving somewhat strangely, so please ensure you keep a tab on it when it crawls into your site.

To get already-been-copied pages, all you need do is get in touch with the search engine in question. They normally delete all copies, though they aren't particularly quick.

Adding pages to MSN, Yahoo and Google, and any other major search engine should be an important goal for all websites. However, before you storm down that path, do remember to ensure you realize the consequences of outdated webpages appearing via the cache.

TIPS ON SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Launching a website and maintaining it isn’t a big deal. You can learn and keep updating yourself about various aspects of a website through the vast resources present in the internet any time. So practically, in no time and with minimum efforts, you end up having a great website with good content and eye-catching graphics. But what do you do next? How do you ensure that people visit your site?

You cannot assume that every single web-user around the world will know how great your site is just as much as you do. The cyberspace is infested with numerous websites, many similar to yours as well. And each claims to offer something unique. There is a website for every thing you can think of. Name any type of business and you have a website to its name for sure. When such is the competition, how do you plan to make your mark and outshine the rest?

The key question — how do you bring the internet traffic to your website?

Web-users know it all too well that whatever they need to find, they will get it in the search engines. The latter is one highly user-friendly internet tool that bridges the gap between the users’ search for a particular thing and the website that offers just that. To find what you want, you just need to think of words or phrases that relates to your need. Say for example you are doing a research on the Halloween festival. Then you just need to type in keywords like “Halloween origins”, “Halloween customs” or “Halloween celebrations” et al. The clever search engine immediately lays out an exhaustive list of websites on Halloween right before you.
But it is known to all that the websites which feature at the top of the search engine result page, get the highest number of clicks and visitors. There is enormous competition to reach the top positions in the search engines, so that visitors get to see your website displayed first as the best among many others. Getting the top ranks is, however, not easy. You are to know a lot about search engine optimization in order to get there.

Here comes the most vital question now — what is search engine optimization? If you are told that search engine optimization is easy and simple, it may sound a little baleful. Nevertheless, it is somewhat true. Following the few following tips will surely help you with your search engine optimization. These tips, if used, will not only help you achieve a high listing in the search engines for your site, but will also ensure more internet traffic to it:

Simple, easy to spell keywords

Internet being a fast-paced medium, its users are impatient and do not stick to one thing for long. They hardly bother to look at the bottom or next page of a search engine results page. They also do not use well-thought-out keywords, at least never in their first search. So you need to keep the keywords of your site as simple and easy as possible. And even if your use commonly misspelled keywords, you should balance it well with all probable spellings of the same word to maximize traffic flow into your site. Complex and long keywords or words having unusual spellings do not get typed often in the search engines. Hence, it is always a good bet to stick to short, simple and easy-to-spell keywords on your site.

Lots of links

The more the links on your site, the better. Search engines appreciate and recognize links. So give as many links as possible in your site—both internal links that link the various web-pages within your site and external links that link to other websites.

Lots of content

Content plays a vital role when it comes to ranking high in search engines. A good lot of keyword-rich content is always conducive to high listing. The search engines rank websites based on their content proportion. So you should keep lots of content in your site and maximize chances of keyword inclusion in that. Remember, however, keywords alone do not count. Content is just as much essential, precisely because search engines do not give a high rank to websites which are rich in keywords and scarce on content. So incorporate sufficient content and even if it is not of the best kind, search engines would excuse that.

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND WHY IS IT NECESSARY?

When you search for a certain something on a search engine it opens up a number of pages containing possible answers for your search. These ‘answers’ are your search results and the pages which contain these are the SERP or Search Engine Result Pages. Now, consider the many times that you have probably used a search engine, and the many results which each of these searches have raked up. If you think about it closely you will probably discover that out of all those million SERP’s that you have opened up through your searches each time you have probably visited at the very most the first 3 pages of results, the rest you have ignored like they didn’t even exist.

As the owner of a website being thus ignored by visitors and sidelined by search engines has probably kept you up nights wondering exactly how you might better the position of your site. Well the answer is simple; through SEO.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization refers to a process by means of which a website earns high ranking amongst the search results, gets a coveted place on the SERP and thereby pulls in a large chunk of ‘unique’ visitors.

Who needs SEO?

Websites can broadly be classified into 4 different types:

• Personal sites
• Corporate Sites
• Sites providing information
• E-commerce sites

As is obvious the first two types of websites can hold their own without using SEO. That is because they are target group is in itself a niche and it doesn’t want or need audiences beyond that niche. However, that cannot be said for the last two types of websites. If you build a site primarily to circulate information or for commercial use then you would definitely need unique visitors, these may be found only by means of good ranking on SERP’s and therefore by means of SEO.

Watch your content, get the right visitors. If you want to lure the right visitors into your website then simply use the right words. Although search engines do not read they do scan the site’s text. The more relevant your content is the higher your chances of a better ranking.

Another important consideration, while on the topic of content, is keywords. Your keywords are words or phrases which summarize or represent the main topic or subject of your site, when a search engine scans the body of your website’s text it picks up these repeating words and match them with the words being searched if they match then you get a high ranking.

When selecting your keywords make sure you choose words which are most likely to be used by users searching for a site like yours or subjects covered by your site. After you have selected them sprinkle them abundantly within the text of your site. However be careful that you don’t unnecessarily stuff them at inappropriate junctures cause that might attract criticism or even a penalty. Your keyword density per page can be anywhere between 5-15%, depending on of course how skillfully you might choose to repeat them. Make sure that you use your key words/phrases freely in the first two paragraphs of the text. Also, remember to include them in the concluding line of your text. But most importantly use them in your anchor text, certain Search Engine’s like Google put a lot of importance on the anchor text of your inbound links.

Judge for yourself

Here are the reasons we think optimization is a must, you decide for yourself.

• More than 80% of net-users find websites by means of search engines.
• 90% of these users do not bother to check beyond the first 30 results.
• 75% of those using search engines intend to buy a product or service.
• “Professional SEO is twice as effective as all other internet marketing methods and 8 times more effective than banner advertisements.”