Posted On: Sun, 10/11/2009 - 11:39pm
The term "Search Engine Optimization" is the action of making your website accessible to the search engines. The top search engines have programs that are commonly referred to as bots. These bots simply go to a web address and catalog all of the content on that page and then follow each link and repeat the process, also known as a web crawl.
Before Google, a person would type their search term. The search engine would take this endless catalog of content built by the bot and start counting the number of times the search term or phrase repeated. The results were organized from the page by the number of occurences in descending order. Due to excessive exploitation, Google revolutionized the way search engines function. Now the whole premise of ranking high with the search engines is PageRank.
Selecting Your Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is the first step to having your website come up first (or close to it) in the search engines and Google. It is important to note that most markets have already been saturated by the major corporations and general information hubs. If you’re a marketing consultant you probably don't want your website to show up as number one for just "consulting", you do however want to show up for "marketing, Stuart, Florida" The point is to choose quality keywords and key-phrases that have a decent amount of demand-- meaning they are searched for often and have a low supply. If there is a high supply you have to offer more content than the competition and at the same time have less filler in the way.
Organizing Your Content
The way your content is organized on your website is the second most important part of search engine optimization. If it is easy for your visitors to find the information, then Google will suggest your website as a resource for that search term or phrase. The best way to structure your website for search engines and humans is to use a hierarchy, similar in a way to the structure of an instruction manual. You start with a main topic or subject page and as you touch on the related sub-topics you give those sub-topics their own pages. and as you right about those you make references to deeper more specific topics and create pages for those, and this is where you should stop if you have pages deeper than that your visitors probably won't read them and google might not find them. Our website is a perfect example:
- Information:
- News:
- Catalog:
- Package Deals
- Web Design
- Web Development
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content Optimization
- Website Promotion
- Web Hosting
- Domain Registration
- SSL Certificates
- Basic SSL
- Basic SSL + Wild Card
- Premium SSL
- Premium SSL + Wild Card
- Premium SGC SSL
- Premium SGC SSL + Wild Card
- Projects
- Open Source
- Proposed
- In Development
- Pre Release
- Released
- Contracted
- Tutorials
- Website Design
- Website Development
- Search Engine Optimization
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social Network Promotion
- Monetization
- Drupal
- Installation
- Configuration
- Customization
- Themes
- Management
- Maintenance
- Development
- Support
- Contact Us
- Support Tickets
- Frequently Asked Questions:
- Purchasing
- Professional Website Package
- Web Hosting
- Domain names
- SSL Certificates
- Management
- Products
- Orders
- Taxonomy
- Vocabularies (sections)
- Terms (categories)
- Term Pages
- Menus
- Pages
- Content
- Users
- Comments
- Blocks
- Updates
- Features
- Advanced Search
- RSS Feeds
- Newsletters
- Content
- Tags
- Keywords
- Description
- Ratings
- Comments
- Social Network Integration
- Link Sharing / Promotion
This website has it's main categories: Home, News, Catalog, Projects, Tutorials, and Support, each with an organized set of sub-categories, that drill down to specific content for each keyword.
Writing Your Content
Relevancy and detail is as important as organization when writing your content. The goal is keyword density. Your keyword or phrase (the search term you want to be found for) should be 1 to 3 percent of the total number of words on the page. If you exceed 5 per cent be careful, the search engines will penalize your webpage for search spam. Remember you're writing for humans, not bots. Optimal keyword density will come naturally if you write with proper grammar and explain each of your topics in good detail.
Incoming Links
Word of mouth works the same for your website as it does in business. The more websites that link to your web page the better, and the search engines will see each of these links as a vote for that particular page and content. This is the basis of PageRank. The more links you have to your page,the better but be careful, you can be penalized for having links to your site from websites that the search engines have flagged as link farms. A link farm is a website that contains nothing but links to other pages on the web. You might be required to pay for your listing or be asked to link back to their website. If this has happened, try and have those links removed from the directory.
PageRank
PageRank in simple terms is how important your website is to the search engine. It is compounded from the following: How often does the term appear on the page? How relevant to the content is the term? How many web pages, with relevant content, link to the page? How important are the web pages linking to the page? If you have a link to your website from a webpage whose PageRank is 4 you get four votes for your website, if the PageRank is 2, two votes, if the page rank is 0 the vote is ignored. The website with the most votes gets a PageRank of 10 and it decreases. If you promote your website properly and with your business gaining popularity on the internet ,your incoming links will grow exponentially. As a result, your PageRank will grow naturally over time.
Blogging
Using blog services like blogger, wordpress, and livejournal is one of the best ways to get webpages with high PageRanks and relevant content to link to your site. You can't just put links to your website from your blog account and expect your PageRank to grow. You actually have to blog about the page or content your linking to. Write about what you do, how you do it, the tools you use, and every time you use a keyword associated with your website link it to the corresponding page. Soon you will have an immense amount of relevant content all directing traffic and search engines to your website and webpages.
Micro-Blogging
Micro blog services like twitter, tumblr, identi.ca and brightkite are a perfect way of announcing new content on your website and your blog and getting the word out about new products or updates to your services and even special promotions or discounts. The micro blog websites have high PageRanks because they are the new social web craze and everyone is blogging about them. You can use this PageRank "bubble" to get some serious votes for your webpages.
Social Bookmarking and News Sharing
Micro blogging, social bookmarking, and news sharing websites are on the hot list of popular internet trends. Services like twitthat, digg, delicious, diigo, StumbleUpon, slashdot /, technorati, Reddit, mixx, Y! bookmarks, Google Bookmarks and Live Bookmarks can really bump up the number of votes you have in terms of PageRank. Each one of those services allows you to submit a title, description, sometimes a thumbnail, a link back to the page you're sharing, and keywords associated with the page. This can really help people and search engines find your website for all the right reasons.
Social Networking
The social networking craze has really come to be very beneficial to search engine marketing and most of them have integrated the technologies listed above. Facebook for example allows you to have status updates, like twitter, link sharing, like delicious, and a blog, like livejournal. The same goes for MySpace, linkedin and Merchant Circle. These websites also have an abundance of other services to help you promote your content and you should use them as often as possible.
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