By: Vats Alok

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of enhancing the visibility of a website on search engine listings. It refers to a list of marketing tools required to arrange a website in order to increase its rankings in the context of the result of pages of search engines and directories.

There are two main types of factors in search engine optimization:

1. On page Optimization
2. Off Page Optimization

On Page Optimization:

On Page Optimization is a technique by means of which your web page gets a high ranking on various Search engines like yahoo, google MCN etc. On page factors are directly related to the content and structure of the website.

Features of On Page Optimization:

Title Tag:

This is an area in a web page where the text is placed that shows the title of the website on the very top of the web browser window. Search engines use title tags to make a link in search results.

Meta tag description:
A Meta Tag Description is a part of web page coding that gives the basic description about the website. This should focus on the website because Meta tag description plays a very important role in web page ranking.

Meta Tag Keywords:
Meta Tag Keywords play the similar role as meta tag description for highlighting the importance of a website.

Keyword Density:
A particular percentage of keywords used on a web page are called keyword density. A keyword must be used in a web page from 2% to 8 % for good page ranking. This technique is the backbone of Search Engine Optimization.

URL Structure:
If you want your website to rank well then your URL of website must be related to the context of the website.

Benefits of On Page Search Engine Optimization:
When creating or updating a commercial website it should be taken into consideration that the products are made more attractive for the viewers. At the same time it must be taken into account that the ability o gain more exposure with a broader target audience has its own benefits. Most websites need to reach out to a larger target audience in order to enhance their business. On Page Optimization allows a higher page ranking and based on a specific keyword or phrases they enter. This process identifies those keywords that will benefit a particular website and uses them in such a way that it gets a higher page ranking when those keywords are searched.

Most searchers only use first page displayed websites on their searches because this is where the pages with higher page rankings are displayed, which translates into these pages find the highest relevance to their keyword searches. This makes it even more vital that each website comprehends the significance and the knowledge necessary to adapt their websites to benefit from Search Engine Optimization.

An understanding of Search Engine Optimization provides the website a higher ranking in the world of search engines. By taking advantage of optimization techniques, more searchers will gain faster access to the particular website. If the website has something worthwhile to offer then this strategy that should be implemented immediately.

REPRINT RIGHTS statement:

This article is free for republishing by visitors provided the Author Bio box is retained as usual so that all links are Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.

Article Source:

http://www.article-buzz.com

Author Alok Vats is associated with many website design and development activities in AN Info Solutions. AN Info Solutions is a SEO Firm from India

By: Marvist

Why is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) necessary?

The playing field is equal on the Internet irrespective of the size of the business and hence Search Engine Optimization becomes so necessary. Most surfers arrive at a particular web site after a search. About 75% of web users in North America use search engines performing about 4 billion searches in a month. Briefly put, search engines are responsible for directing visitors to a website. Sadly, not many business owners know how to get their web sites listed in the databases of search engines, nor do they know how to get their site a higher rank when related key words are searched for.

How SEO works?

Several ecommerce sites face the problem of shopping cart abandonment. Web sites face an average abandonment rate of 30% or more. The main reasons for shopping cart abandonment are:

If a website has to be listed in a search then either it has it to be submitted or has to be among the ones indexed by search engine robots (bots) that travel across the web in search of web sites to add to their database. In order to rank higher, web sited must be optimized appropriately. Ranking is important from a statistical point of view as in the first site listed in the results page of a search engine is visited by thrice the number of people than the fifth site, result sites found on the first page of search are visited 78% more than the ones found between 11th and 30th.

Having the correct key words and a high amount of link popularity is the key to SEO.
The higher the frequency of the keywords and the higher the number of links to you site especially from similar websites, the better the ranking.

Search engines like Google look at links for a web site as validation. More validation means that a web site is listed higher in search results, provided it is well optimized.

A few companies try an illegitimate techniques called ‘black hat’ to increase rankings by building link farms. The companies make these farms by creating numerous websites usually of similar content all linking back to the main site. However, web sites using this and other black hat techniques always run the risk of being caught and not being listed in search engines at all.

Web Sites with graphic content can be optimized to suit search engines, as the latter are incapable of transforming pictures into words. However, this problem can be overcome by placing key words in a concealed bot recognizable code (known as alt tag) connected to each image and by providing small captions above the images.

Other type of hidden text known as meta tags can be inserted into the web page code for eg. page header, description and key words found in the web site. Although search engines don’t consider them as that important these days following meta tag abuse, any type of optimization helps the web site.

Another way to optimize your web site is by using key words in place of hyperlinks in a web site. The key words in the links get captured by the robots that are in the search of them for adding to their database.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com

Search Marketing Training Center offers a collection of Internet marketing tips to help business managers and business owners understand Internet marketing and its growing importance as a key component of overall marketing.

By: Roberta Sedycias

You might be wandering the reasons your web site is not getting much internet traffic. After all your web site took lots of financial and human resources, but unfortunately like so many web sites, it is quite unknown and as a result it does not get enough internet traffic to make it financially viable.

Did you know that about 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from search engines? Yes, it is true! Listing near the top page of search engines and obtaining the attention of your target audience should be a main priority for any web site internet promotion.

And the good news about this is that improving a web site position in search engine pages may be done for free. How? Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

There are many ways to promote a web site. Some promotions are paid and some are free. Among the free ones, the search engine optimization techniques enable web sites to become search engine friendly. In other words, it makes website pages to accept the search engine crawler in a friendly way. These techniques will be some of the steps one will have to use to obtain a better position in search engine’s pages, when searching for specific keywords, related to services or products offered by a web site.
Search engine optimization steps for a web page:

Title:

The html Title tag is a very important element and must include the most important keywords or phrases, which best represent the products or services offered by the web page. It should not contain more than 60 characters.

Keywords:

The html meta Keyword tag should have all the keyword phrases which best represents the products or services offered by the web page. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 250 characters.

Description:

The html meta Description tag is a description of the web page, which will be displayed by the search engine. Make sure it contains keywords phrases. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 200 characters.
Keywords in Headings:

Keywords in Headings tags (h1) will be interpreted by search engines as being an important keyword relevant to the web page, and it should be looked for and indexed by the search engines.

Web page text:

It is a good practice to include informative text one every page, using natural language and appropriate keywords. It should contain more than 200 words. Informative text should be placed in the html Body section of the web page.

Keywords in Alt Tags:

Every html picture “img” tag should contain an ALT tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Keywords in Anchor Tags:

Every html hypertext link “a href ” should contain a TITLE tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Robots.txt file:

Make sure there is a robots.txt file in you web site directory. This is a text file created by the webmaster, which will guide the search engine´s crawler when indexing a web site.

There are some cases in which one might not want to have some web pages indexed. This way thru the use of robots.txt, one will have control over which pages will be indexed and made available to the search engines.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /data/

HTML code validation:

Search engine’s crawlers become more efficient when indexing web pages with no html errors. Beware that some html errors can make search engine crawlers to give up indexing web pages. So it is recommended for those web pages to be indexed, there should be no html errors.

Links:

Links are very important to search engines. The quality of links and whether it is reciprocal or not, are important factors in evaluating the importance of a web page. Links from web sites with higher page ranks are a plus.

Registering with Directories and Search Engines:

It is very important the registration of a website with directories and search engine web sites. It is a way of telling the world that your web site exists. Avoid using automatic search engine/directory registration.
Search engine optimization has become a very important set of procedures which helps web sites to become more relevant to search engines. To obtain an increase in internet traffic will take some time. It probably will take some kind of additional promotion too. But anybody in need of higher internet traffic, free search engine optimization might be considered his first option.

Roberta Sedycias
IT ConsultantThis article is under GNU FDL license and can be distributed without any previous authorization from the author. However the author´s name and all the URL´s (links) mentioned in the article and biography must be kept.Article By:

This article can also be accessed in portuguese language from the News Article section of page PoloMercantil

Roberta Sedycias has a bachelor degree in Business Administration and over 20 years experience in systems analysis and computer programming. Currently working as IT consultant for www.PoloMercantil.com.br

By: Audrey Okaneko

I want to share a story. Last week I became aware that I was out of return address labels. Instead of waiting until Sunday’s paper came and grabbing the insert offering this item, I decided to look online and find return address labels.

I went to Google and did a search for “return address labels.” I clicked on the very first site listed. When I got there, I had no idea from their front page what they were selling. I scanned the page, did not see return address labels and so returned to Google. In order for this site to have been number one on Google, they had to have used “return address labels” somewhere in their site, but their front page did not have these 3 words listed there. Back on Google, I clicked on the link to the right, figuring someone paid money to be listed there. What I was looking for was the cheap 500 to a roll return address labels. When I got to this new site, the site someone paid to have listed under “return address labels” they had 6 pictures on the front page, all very fancy labels and quite pricy for what I was seeking. I did a quick scan of the page and did not see where I should click to find just inexpensive rolls of labels. Once again, I left the site.

So, it was back to Google, where I finally clicked on a page half way down the page, listed about 50 on Google and right there on the front page, I saw exactly what I wanted. I placed the order.

While it’s wonderful to have your page on top, to be number one, if you don’t have what the customer wants, they will click off. One thousand hits with no sales defeats the purpose of driving traffic to your website. Traffic does not equal sales. That site with the 6 photos would have done better to select a niche market and optimize for those keywords versus a generic “return address labels”

Choosing your keywords is important. Make choices that truly reflect what you are offering. Remember you can select different keywords for every page on your site. Choose the words that best suit the one page you are working on.

WAHM Articles: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Audrey Okaneko has been working at home since 1983. She can be reached at audreyoka@cox.net or visited at www.recipe-barn.com

By: Alex Roderick

In the present time, we are so obsessed with Search Engine Optimization and Google Page Rank that many of the webmasters tend to think that SEO and Top Positions in Google would lead them to a hidden treasure and would immediately result in Tens of Thousands of dollars of business flowing into their bank.

They are wrong, Top Rankings wouldn’t be your best bet always, I’ve seen websites in Top Positions in Google for the worlds most competitive keywords, sustaining there for a considerable time and then eventually, falling down, changed their business methodology, or changing their business plans altogether.

Apologies for my Grammatical Errors, but I’m only a techie trying to share my experience but not a Web Copywriter or a linguistic.

I wouldn’t name the website here, but I know well about them because I was trying to compete with them for two most competitive keywords “web design company” and “web designing company” If you doubt that these keywords are so competitive, I would like you to have a look at this great tool which would tell you how competitive a keyword and a phrase is, it’s fun to play with.

This website was on top for a long time, their portfolio was nice, their site design and layout was brilliant and there prices were very competitive, but suddenly one fine day I saw their business methodology totally changed, they were now selling an online casino package and have shut down their web design operations and kept them on a low profile (at least on their website it seems that way). After a month their rankings fell and they were virtually non existent on that keyword term, but of course they are on prominent position for their targeted keywords now once again, but the keywords are different obviously.

So why did they do that, If they were willing to foray into a different field, why did they leave their existent business, I would think because their existent business was not very profitable so they decided to shut it down and do something which is more worthwhile for them to do.

So, Top Rankings do not guarantee Mind Blowing Profits, If your Industry is over saturated, then you can’t count on Top Rankings for a pool of money flowing in to your business.

The idea is that Webmasters should not keep trying to compete on competitive keywords and spend all their valuable time and resources there, Top Rankings could help your business grow but it’s not the only way where you can grow your business, I was able to get top rankings on keywords “web design company” in Yahoo & MSN, so did it help my business?? The answer is – Not Much. Much of the Business (90% of it), I’m generating is from direct marketing, emailing and other traffic building activities. This is not good considering that 40% of Search Traffic comes from Yahoo & MSN, 50% from Google, and 10% from other search engines, so where did I go wrong. The answer is no where, I didn’t do anything wrong, It’s a fact that only 10-20% of your customers come from Search Engines by searching your most optimized keywords even if you are on Top 10 Positions on them. Of course if you solely don’t rely on Search Engines for your Business.

Opt in E-Mail Marketing is the cheapest media to grow your business, Currently I’m getting 150-200 inquiries from customers interested in my products and services, out of which only 5% of these inquires are coming from Yahoo & MSN Searches, so if I somehow manage to get top positions on my favorite keywords on Google also, would my inquiries increase considerably? I doubt that, it would surely help, but it’s not worth the sleep less nights I was devoting earlier for SEO.

I would now rather create a great looking website, launch brilliant products, develop more and more stuff in Flash, of course if it’s user friendly to my visitors and loads quickly, develop better advertising channels and wouldn’t care a damn about Search Engine Rankings, It would be better if I concentrate to convert my traffic better than creating textual ordinary looking pages for Search Engines or pray for Google’s Mercy on my website and awake countless nights for it, at least I learned the Lesson Quick.

The Lesson learned by me is to concentrate more on bringing visitors to your site and converting them well by giving them a sense of personal touch and value rather then only try and compete on Google Rankings and Page Rank.

Give them stuff for free, which is useful for them, provide them resources which are lying with you on your website for free, create a nice looking website, which interacts with your clients well, show your skills and the customers would love you, Merely getting a Top Ranking in Google and a Page Rank 7 won’t do wonders.
I have seen Page Rank 7 websites getting less than 50 visitors per day and Page Rank 4 Websites getting more than 500 visitors per day, So if you concentrate only giving your customers a value, it will automatically allow people to talk about you and give you your desired position, if you create a new site, provide valuable services, links will automatically flock to you and so do the visitors by word of mouth. It’s better to create a valuable site for your visitors then compete for the Page Rank 7.

Websites like Paypal.com, myspace.com, cnn.com, orkut.com etc didn’t have to spend very heavily on Search Engine optimization, where they did spend was on advertisements, pay per click, News and convert their customers well by providing exceptionally valuable and unique services, which lead to natural link building.

I doubt any link Building or SEO company would have built the 363, 000 links to paypal.com, or Yahoo would have hired 50 Search Engine Professionals to build their mammoth 1,990,000 links.

These companies concentrated on bringing more visitors to their site from every known channel and making them stick to their business rather than compete for Page Rank and top positions on a given keyword and they succeeded well.

While many sites which achieved Page Rank 7, by only competing for keyword position fail in the end, since they didn’t have an alternate sustainable business model or were not able to get their customers to buy their products.

One more myth that many people have is that if a given keyword is getting X amount of searches a month on Overture, they would perhaps receive the same amount of visitors on ther site too if they succeed in getting top rankings. That’s a myth.

For an example, my website is ranking No. 8 most of the times for the keyword “web design company” on Yahoo Search, According to Overture Keyword research tool the monthly searches done on this keyword are 13,000 for the month of January, 2007.

But according to my Webalizer stats, I’m getting not more than 100-120 visits per month from the given keyword, which is far less compared to the total number of visitors coming on my site ever month which is currently around 9000.
I wouldn’t be concluding anything here, since it’s up to the readers to decide how they want to perceive and act upon my experience, However I welcome everyone reading this article to contact me anytime if they think I’m not correct on some facts, or if they wish to clarify their doubts, Please feel free to contact me my clicking the below link and filling the feedback form on my website.

I would be more than happy to assist you.
About the Author

Alex Roderick

The author is Business Head for The Web Design Company. It deals in web site design, web page design, website redesign, flash, 3D animation, logos, Banner Adds etc.

Article Source: http://greatarticlesformoms.com