What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization, generally called SEO, is the process by which you tweak your website to get high rankings in results of search engines like yahoo, google etc.

Why SEO?
The internet is a blind alley. The people surfing the internet do not know where the document they are looking for exists. So they turn to search engine for help.
Most of these people, will visit a site which comes up on the first page. If you are on the first page, its like the search engine saying, yeah this site is good.
So whether you are trying to sell something or just want your blog to be read by many more people, if you need more visitors to your site, you need to do SEO.

How SEO?
How to get a good ranking in search engines? Hmm. There is no clear answer to it. The SE(search engines) have very complex and intelligent algorithms to rank websites. And no one knows what these algorithms are. But some data about the algorithms is known. And we have to base our SEO on that.

Your first steps: Meta tags.
HTML pages have a meta tag describing the page. The content within the meta tag is not visible to the visitors of your pages. But the SE use them to find out about your pages. However these days most of the SE give very little weight to meta tags. This is due the fact that in past web masters used meta tags to fill the page with keywords. So even if the page was about buying used cars, the webmasters used “get rich quick” in meta tag, if they came to know that many people were searching for this. But still some SE use meta tags, you must use your meta tag to tell the SE about your site.

Designing your website.
The SE are bad at indexing pages containing frames, excessive javascript and based on flash. So it might be a good idea to use them sparingly. If you use them, be aware that you are taking a SE hit.

Getting linked.
The technique most of the SE use these days to find out how good your site is to find the number of pages which link to your pages. Think about it, if someone is putting a link to your site, it is as if they are saying, hey man visit this site, its cool. Also SE see, how popular a site which links to you is. If a page which is very popular links to you, you will get more benefit.
So if you want to rank higher, you will have to get links to your site. The easiest and also the hardest is to write good and unique content for your website. If your website is good other people will automatically link to it. So in essence they are helping you for free. Your various pages too should be linked together; this too increases your link popularity.
You must submit your website to the web directories like DMOZ and Yahoo Directories, for them to be indexed. SE give a lot of value for being linked in these directories.
Another method is reciprocal link exchange. In this you look for a website similar to yours, and about as popular. Then you ask the webmaster of that site if they would put up a link to yours site, if you linked to them. Many would agree as it helps them too.

Choosing the right keywords.
You must have an idea of what your potential visitors will search for when they visit your site. No matter how highly your page is ranked, if it does not have the correct keywords, no search engine is going to show it. So, if your web site is about buying used cars, make sure that this key phrase is used many times in your page. Some places which are given special importance by SE are the URL of the page, the heading of the page, bold text. But do not fill your pages with keywords excessively as some SE consider this as spam.

Submitting to SE, link farms etc.
SE have page where you can submit your site to them. However this is seldom necessary. If you have links coming to your site, it will soon be picked up by the SE. So your time is better spent creating content for your website.
Link farms are pages which let you add links to your pages free of cost. It is best to avoid them as the SE know the link farms and don’t even visit them. Even if SE visit them, they are so full with links that your site does not get any value out of being linked there. So at best you do not get any advantage, at worst you are penalized.

Breaking the rules.
There are many underhand techniques used to gain SE popularity. One method used in the past was to make key word text and background as same color. Then the visitors saw something else from the SE. However today’s SE can detect such underhand techniques and penalize it. So it is best to stay away from such techniques.

SEO dos and do nots.
Dos

  1. Create content rich, unique websites.

 

  1. Get links from similar websites.

 

  1. Submit to directories like DMOZ.

Do nots

  1. Avoid frames, flash etc if at all possible.

 

  1. Avoid underhand tactics, like text and background as same color.

 

  1. Avoid link farms, FFA etc

 

  1. Don’t waste your time submitting to search engines. Let them find you.

The next steps.
SE use complex algorithm to rate webpages which is constantly changing. The ideas above are just indicators. Visit various websites to find out what the current techniques are.

Some parting tips.
1. Use link:yoururl in google/msn/yahoo search to find number of pages linking to you. Dont worry if you find only some pages linking to you, as SE these days only show a fraction of links they know.
2. Use site:yourdomain in google search to find the number of your pages indexed by Google.

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Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/search-engine-optimization-seo-tips-and-tutorial-1649496.html

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential part of the planning in our internet marketing business. When applying SEO on your website, you will gain invaluable and free advertising because your website is now well ranked. A visible website on the search engine is more likely to be viewed and in this way, you stand to gain free traffic.

SEO is a crucial strategy which helps a website to gain better ranking on search engines. There are a couple of ways for SEO: keyword density, prominence, META tags, titles and inbound links. Let us take a look at each of the element in detail.

  • Keyword density: it means to use relevant keywords in the content of your webpage. This makes your website more relevant and thus search engines are likely to place such websites at the top of a search. For example, a weight loss website should have more keyword density on ‘diet’, ‘slimming’ etc.
  • Prominence of keyword: it means the position of your keywords. For example, by applying the keywords at the beginning and the end of the content of your website, your website will be deemed to be prominent and hence ranked high. The prominence of keywords also applies to codes of a website and the META tags.
  • Inbound links: these are links placed on other people’s website and help to increase traffic to yours. The relationship is simple; the more inbound links to your website, the higher your rank on the search. Think of it as an affirmation that your website is a credible one because other people are recommending your website. To strengthen these strategies, you should get your inbound links from websites that ranks well with the search engines.

To further understand the importance of SEO, think in terms of the habits of the internet users. Most of us would hardly surf past the 1st page of the results on a search engine. By being visible on the search engine, we gain free traffic. With these tips, you can now apply a certain form of SEO on your website!

Now that you’ve received tips on how to boost your internet marketing business, I’ve a story to tell.

A miser sold all that he had and bought a lump of gold, which he buried in a hole in the ground by the side of an old wall and went to look at daily.

One of his workmen observed his frequent visits to the spot and decided to watch his movements. He soon discovered the secret of the hidden treasure, and digging down, came to the lump of gold, and stole it.

The Miser, on his next visit, found the hole empty and began to tear his hair and to make loud lamentations.

A neighbor, seeing him overcome with grief and learning the cause, said, “Pray do not grieve so; but go and take a stone, and place it in the hole, and fancy that the gold is still lying there. It will do you quite the same service; for when the gold was there, you had it not, as you did not make the slightest use of it.”

You can now pick up your piece of gold at http://www.happytomakeyourich.com to help explode your inbox with cash and keep in mind, the value of the product is determined by how you use it.

You can now pick up your piece of gold at http://www.happytomakeyourich.com to help explode your inbox with cash and keep in mind, the value of the product is determined by how you use it.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/are-you-killing-your-internet-marketing-business-by-not-applying-seo-1433794.html

How Search Engine Spiders Work

There are hundreds of search engines available today, but some are far more complex than others. This article will give you an overview of how some of the most popular ones work.

Let’s start with a smaller engine: InfoSeek. They only index about 200 words of your web page, so it’s important to make sure that you have meta tags on your site, and that the most important things are listed first. The information you put in your meta tags will be used to display a description of your site, and most meta tags can contain about 200 characters of text. The keywords meta tag, however, can have up to 1,000 characters.

These simple rules are important to keep in mind for all search engines. The more important that the information is, the closer it has to be to the beginning of your meta tags or even the beginning of your site’s content. Many search engines won’t even touch your meta tags so it is important that you have the same information in your body that you have in your meta tags (although you obviously cannot simply enter lists and lists of key words as this would be detrimental to your site’s content).

The AltaVista search engine will send Scooter, its spider, to check out your entire site. Scooter can take as long as three months to spider and fully index your site – the average spider only takes 6-8 weeks. Scooter will normally spider somewhere between two and ten pages from your site each week. This means that the longer that your web site lasts, the better it will be indexed which is in example of how search engines implement Darwin’s Theory into their ideology.

Excite used to be a search powerhouse, but has now been dropped as the provider of AOL and Netscape search, so it’s less important than it once was. The algorithm it uses to determine keyword relevance is very complicated: it indexes your pages and then attempts to summarize them by selecting only the most relevant sentences. Expect to have your pages reviewed roughly once every two weeks. Keep in mind, though, that with meta tags have no meaning to Excite when it comes to rankings, even though it will use your description tags as long as the words are relevant to your pages’ content.

Let’s move on to Lycos. Lycos has fully integrated the Open Directory Project (ODP) into their mainstream results pages, and they also use search results from AllTheWeb. Lycos also runs click-throughs to their sister site HotBot. Lycos is one of the harder search engines to understand, as their submission pages say one thing but then they index your site in a completely different way. As a general rule of thumb, your site will be indexed in Lycos in due time as long as you get indexed in ODP and AllTheWeb.

Even though WebCrawler is owned by Excite, it still has its own search engine and indexer. If you happen to be listed with WebCrawler, you should try to stay listed with them, as it isn’t the easiest search engine to get listed with. Its hit-and-miss standards combined with the sporadic indexing methods makes the submission process tough, although not impossible.

The biggest player is, of course, Google, who use a page ranking system as the central basis of their index. It was once nearly impossible to manipulate this page ranking system to drive up your rankings, but people quickly figured out that the more links they could generate to their site on the rest of the net, the better Google ranked them. Google is not thought to be using context-sensitive rankings. Context-sensitive information is used at Yahoo, Looksmart and the ODP, however, and Google regularly spiders those sites when it re-indexes its own database.

MSN is another important search engine. The holy trinity of search engines at the moment is Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These three search engines combine to provide you with the vast majority of the traffic that you will receive from search engines. MSN will generally be the first search engine to index your site and it will almost certainly list the most pages the fastest.

Although no-one can tell you exactly when you will be indexed on any search engine, it’s best to check back at least weekly. Whatever you do, though, don’t re-submit your site more often than every two months or so – you might not get indexed at all if you do this.

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Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/how-search-engine-spiders-work-1410398.html

Are Meta Tags Important?

Meta tags are employed both by search engines, and in an indirect way by people.

Are meta tags critical? Every search engines emphasizes meta tags differently. Google doesn’t let the public know how it uses meta tags. I have noticed that a lot of websites show up on the first page of Google for specific subjects and yet they don’t have any keyword or description tags. So don’t let anybody fool you by exaggerating how important they are for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines index algorithms vary greatly — some assign a lot of importance to meta tags, so it is a good idea to use them.

Meta tags are lines of code that are hidden in web pages. The code information is not revealed in the web browser (but refer to the discussion of the description tag, below) but they are utilized by search engines to help categorize your web content. It is possible that you might choose to omit descriptions, or keywords, but your site won’t look right if you don’t put a “title” tag, since the web browsers will show it as “Untitled”.

In order to obtain traffic (by cheating) a long time ago, people would place repetitive or irrelevant information into their meta tags — “stuffing” them. As a penalty, several search engines don’t put too much importance on keywords in meta tags, but they still look at them to be certain they have meaning. Whichever the case, your rank will probably suffer on other search engines if you lack meta tags, or have useless keywords.

The “head” section of a web page is where meta tags are found. Some people suggest using only lowercase letters in your tags, and avoid repeating terms within the keyword tag.

Generally speaking, the actual meta tag contents appear invisible; however the “description” meta tag’s contents will turn up in the majority of search engines together with the page title in the search results. Do not overdo your meta description; you can place keywords in the description tag, but try to keep language natural, in complete sentences, and keep it short and relevant.

Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. If you are looking for a Houston web site designer, look no further. If you need a few changes to your current site, InfoServe Media also offers website maintenance whether we host your site or not.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/are-meta-tags-important-1125048.html

Whenever people go to use the search engines like Google or Yahoo, they are looking for information. If you do a close analysis of the sites that comes tops for most searches, they mostly originate from the US and the Europe. The question I would like to pose is this: why don’t websites from other parts of the world like Africa appear? Is it that the websites have paid the search engine providers so that their websites may appear there?

Well, my answer to this is only one: most of the African websites that exist are not search engine friendly. What I mean by this is that they don’t have enough content on them to begin attracting search engines. As stated earlier, whenever people are using search engines they are looking for information. This means that search engines will always give preference to the sites with most information than to one with more flash images and many ads on it.

It is for this reason that many Ugandan websites don’t perform well with the others. It is very possible for a website from Uganda to be indexed in the top pages of a search. All one has to do is to have the relevant content on it. If I have to repeat this statement over and over again, I will not mind because this is the only way your website will do well: whenever people are using search engines they are looking for information. The more information you have, the higher your chances of being top in search results.

Most of the Ugandan websites I have observed don’t have adequate information. This is where SEO (search engine optimization) comes. The work involved in SEO services include generating content for websites, creating high valuable links on the same and having the right meta tags. These things may seem hard to understand, but you can always get SEO experts to help you in understanding this.

You can get your Ugandan website to compete with the begin guns by having SEO services for your website.

The author is an expert in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and is capable of making your website appear top in search engines. Read more about SEO services

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/seo-services-in-uganda-that-can-bring-profits-through-your-website-983720.html

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