The world wide web is a highly competitive market. Companies vie for the attention of billions of internet users in the search for more revenue. A lynch pin to the internet marketing war is the search engine.
Search engines are internet venues where billions of people congregate to search for information. The most prominent search engine giants are of course Google and Yahoo. The kind of traffic these dot-com companies receive per hour is phenomenal.
So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites.
In order to maximize ranking and placement, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.
Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methods of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.
Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.
Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are pay-per-click (PPC), advertisements, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.
Getting or trying to increase traffic to web site requires a plan and effort. The rewards are well worth it.
Organic searches are searches conducted by web users in a search engine that is free from solicitations. A study from Jupiter Media stated that 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases were from organic searches versus paid online ads.
This has made SEO much more in demand in creating revenue for companies as SEO is not a paid ad but a method of intrinsically improving content.
Here are a few tips on improving content for a much more improved result in organic searches:
1. Expertise. Follow your strengths. Sites you set up must be on subjects you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away.
2. Plan the site. A good layout for the site can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser.
3. Research. Check out the competition and see what they have set up. See what works and what does not. If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.
4. Decide on important keywords. Decide on the most important keywords to use for your sight. Include these keywords in the copy page, meta tags, page title, and file names.
5. The Search Engine is your friend. Make friends with your search engine and don’t give it a hard time. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your site up to your target audience.
6. Focus. Focus on the topic at hand and nothing else. The rule is one topic per page.
7. Join the directories. Directories are repositories of knowledge done by human hands while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods. The relevancy of your page when joining the right directory may shoot through the roof. Of course, make sure you know what you are talking about.
8. Start a linking campaign. A most effective SEO method. This is a must do. Ask your allies, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances to place your site’s URL link on their sites. With a short description this can draw traffic from other sites and increase exposure. Google especially ranks the importance of its sites by the number of sites linked to it.
9. Repetition is the key to victory. Keep repeating the above tips, supporting and increasing what works and killing what does not as fast as possible until the desired result is achieved.
In the world of search engine optimization, content matters a lot. If a site has amateur or worse falsified information, fewer and fewer visitors will want to visit it. They will spread bad news even faster than they spread good news, so expect a garbage site to be ignored even in a week’s time.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
sandy 02.27.10 at 5:42 pm
Wish I understood keywords more. Hate using the same words over and over, makes your articles boring and repetitive
Sandy
Matt 05.03.10 at 4:17 pm
I wish I understood google more, then I dont think guys that have been in this industy a lot longer than me totally understand why gogle make the decisions they do.
Day Planner 05.06.10 at 4:02 am
It is so important to get all those things right.
Steve 06.23.10 at 3:52 am
Great article, SEO is like black magic, especially now that Google has released Caffeine. You have to try to understand why Google/Bing etc use these complex algorithms and what they’re really trying to do.
S
mobilt bredbånd 07.26.10 at 3:41 pm
Good stuff, Tricia. It’s actually not that complicated but it’s good to have repeated in a simple way.
Zoe 08.04.10 at 6:38 am
I’ve found that using synonyms can be handy as using the same keywords over and over again will keep bringing up the same rubbish. For instance, if you’re searching for a restaurant in a certain area maybe try typing in “eating establishment” or even eating out reviews. At the end of the day it all comes down to money and like every successful corporate business there are plenty of holes and bad parts. The trick is not to believe everythiny you read and use your initiative.
Katya 09.13.10 at 12:15 am
I found that being loyal greatly helps as well because you encounter loyalty that is lasting
boutique hotels manhattan 10.16.10 at 3:05 am
google algorithm are so complex to understand…should be very careful with every move..
Knoxville movers 11.24.10 at 4:50 pm
Thanks for this checklist. I’m going to print it out so that it’s always handy when I’m working on my site.