Tavis Understands SEO, Does That Make Him The Smartest Guy On The Internet?
What in the world is Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) and why is it so incredibly important to have a basic understanding of it as a website owner?. Even if you’re not the Smartest Guy On The Net, it’s very easy to understand. SEO is basically the process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword(s) and keyword phrases related to your promotional offer, article, service, etc etc and ensuring that this particular keyword phrase is going to actually show up on the search results when someone searches for your product. It’s completely useless to have the prettiest website in the world if nobody can find your site in the search results and this is the essence of SEO.
Search Engine Optimization basically involves fine tuning or optimizing the content of your page along with the HTML and “Meta Tags” and also involves an appropriate link building process. The more links to your webpages from other external sites, the higher the probability your site is considered relevant or these other outside sources wouldn’t be linking to you (pretty logical isn’t it?) The most popular search engines are obviously Google, Yahoo, MSN but there are also many other 2nd tier search engines as well (kanoodle, pageseeker, search123, 7search, searchfeed to name a few). Each and every search engine guards their methods and ranking algorithms very closely in an attempt to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to prevent spam pages or automatically generated sites or programs from plugging up. A search engine may use hundreds of different factors when ranking their results where the factors considered and the weight each carries are always changed. These algorithms can vary so widely between search engines that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine may rank #200 in another search engine. I have no idea where my smartest guy on the web post ranks on some of the other search engines, but since you probably never even heard those 2nd tier search engines I provided earlier, I’m not terribly concerned about ranking in their results – Google is the mother of all search engines anyway so that’s what I focus on. New sites don’t need to be “submitted” to search engines in order to be indexed. A simple backlink from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to index or spider its information. It could take a few days to even weeks from the introduction of a backlink from an established web for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.
- Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.
- Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
- Don�t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.
- Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.
- Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
If all of this doesn’t make any sense at all and you have no idea what the optimal keywords are to target for your specific website or market, there are MANY 3rd party companies out there who can help you out. Reputable search engine promotion and optimization companies will look at the plan for your website and make suggestions to improve your search engine rankings which translates to more website visitors. As an option, many can also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make further recommendations for editing and other improvements to sustain your site traffic flowing and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization consultant works as a team with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that each and every aspect of design are considered at the same time.
So at the end of the day, this article should shed some light on what SEO is all about and how it can help the average hobby webmaster who isn’t the Smartest Guy On The Net.
Post a comment