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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

[private].[/private]What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the old fashioned way to improve and maximize your ranking on the search engines. It is about making your website in such a way that it will appear higher in the search rankings. A website that’s optimized for search engines can reap huge benefits on to your website and your business. SEO has to do with keywords and keyword phrases.

Think about it. There are literally millions upon millions of websites indexed by the major search engines. How is anyone going to find your site in all of that? The key to this problem is “keywords”.

What is a keyword? It is simply a term used for the words that are commonly punched into the search engines by browsers looking for content on a specific topic. For instance, in our ongoing example, “cat grooming” is the keyword phrase. The more times this appears on someone’s site or in an article linking to that site, the greater the chances someone searching this term will find it.

The key is to ensure you have a good keyword density. Keyword density refers to the percentage of the appearance of the keywords in an article or on a website. The rule of thumb in this case is to have between 2% and 5% keyword density. The trick here is to fit the keyword in numerous times while ensuring that the flow of the article is smooth and natural.

Why does SEO matter? To understand the answer to this question, we have to take a look at how search engines operate. Without this knowledge, you are likely to find you never get listed on any major search engines and since as much as 86% of websites are visited via search engines directly and there are over 300 million searches carried out per day, every day, this is something you really need to understand.

Once upon a time, ranking high up on the search engines was simply a case of adding a few tags and then waiting in line until your website moved up the list of sites with similar keywords. These days, it’s a much more complex affair, but ProFromGo will keep you right at the forefront when such developments occur.

Every search engine has programs called crawlers, spiders, or robots that crawl through the web from page to page. These crawlers “crawl” from one link to another and retrieve the contents of each page. These pages are indexed on the search engine and, although no one really knows how this indexing works (except the people who make them and run them), your keyword choice and density play a major role in how your site will rank.

Notice I said they crawl from one link to another? This means that part of SEO is to have a link to your website on as many other websites as possible. You can do this through:

• Articles
• Multiple pages on your site
• Banner ads
• AdSense

When the crawlers “see” the content of each page of the site, they will focus on the keywords and the stronger the keyword representation, the higher up in the search engine rankings it goes.

Keywords

Finding the correct keywords is the most important thing you can do for your website with regards to SEO. Good keywords are those that are frequently searched for (high demand), but are not being targeted by many other websites (low competition).

Since it’s not always easy to know what’s what, most companies specializing in SEO use a number of tools available on the Internet to find the most effective keywords. The most commonly used tools are as follows;

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool (FREE)
2. Word Tracker (Trial/Subscription)

Once you have used these tools and found the best keywords for your own particular site, it’s time to start implementing them into your overall framework.

Implementing Keywords

Once you’ve found some great keyword phrases, you need to put them in the important places within each web page. Search engines give higher relevance to certain words and phrases within HTML documents so it’s essential that you put your keyword phrases in the correct positions.

The more confident a search engine is about the subject of your website, the higher your web pages will be in the search rankings. If you only place your keyword phrases in the META tags, your website will not get a high ranking.

Some of the best places to put keyword phrases are:

Simplified HTML

Search engines scour the Internet looking for web pages to index, following links from one web page to the next. To ensure a search engine ranking, all pages on your website must be accessible to search engines. Some search engines have problems with:

If any of these describe pages on your website, then your web pages will probably not achieve a high search engine ranking.

Important: Have a high number of quality links pointing to the website

Inbound links to a website play a significant part in determining its position in the search engines. Be aware though, it’s not just the quantity, but also the quality and click-through-rate of links to your website that are of importance.