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How to Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
By Reginald Liggins
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is is the process of tweaking web site properties to
obtain higher rankings in search engine results. However, ranking in itself does not
guarantee profits, you need targeted prospective visitors sent to your website for that.
So why are the Search Engines so vital? Well, there are over 162 million registered
websites on the web.
There are basically three ways that people can arrive at your site: using search
engines, clicking on a link from another website, or by knowing your URL (uniform resource
locator) and typing that in web browser.
Almost half of all internet users use search engines on a typical day online. A site
that does not appear on the first page of search results might as well be invisible.If
your site is invisible, you will not get any visitors, nor make any sales.
There are three search engines that are of supreme importance though: Google accounts
for about 62 percent of all searches, Yahoo about 21 percent, MSN (Bing) about 9 percent.
That said, there is no need to give any credence to ads promising submission to hundreds
or thousands of search engines. I mean, Google, Yahoo and MSN combine for over 90 percent
of all searches. Likewise, you shouldn't give any credence to any ads promising a number 1
SE rankings, because no legitimate company can promise you that. It has been said, that in
offline marketing, there is no elevator to success, everyone must take the stairs. The
same is true in online marketing. If you want a fighting chance of making it big online,
you will have to spend some time, or money, or both. But you will definitely invest
something. In spite of everything you've heard, there is no free lunch on the internet.
There are several things you can do to rank higher. One thing you can do is construct a
SE friendly site that facilitates easy crawling or spidering. This includes having a SE
friendly URLs constructed with different keywords on different pages. You can also create
linkable footers on every page. Also creating a site index will make it easier for the
search engine to crawl your site. But what is really going to matter is the content of
your site.
Specifically, the search engines are looking for relevancy, link popularity, and unique
original content. Google, for one, pays a lot of attention to site relevance in its search
results. Relevance is about making your site a useful resource for information instead of
"keyword stuffing" and other tricks. So if someone arrived at your site upon entering a
specific search phrase, would they be satisfied with what they found? So relevance denotes
how well your site meets the information needs of the user.
Sometimes how relevant a site is can be determined by its link popularity. That is the
number of associated sites linking in to your website. And of course, one of the things
that's going to influence your link popularity is the presence of unique, original
content. Because of all of the competition on the web, you want to be creating content for
your site on a consistent basis, some even say daily. If your site is not being updated,
the search engines will assume that there is nothing new on your site, so why send
somebody there?
There are quite a number of content marketing strategies, like article and video
marketing, that you can employ. In addition, there are several Inbound Link Campaigns that
you can use to raise your link popularity. Still you will see a lot of short-cuts out
there, like automatic content generators and others. Because people are always looking to
beat the system, search engines like Google often change the rules. Sometimes, if Google
feels like you are trying to cheat, or if your site lacks relevance they may reduce your
Page Rank or take other punitive actions against you and your site. But if you just buckle
down and do the work, create unique and relevant content on a consistent basis; then your
relationship with the search engines should be a fruitful one.
Reginald Liggins is an internet marketing trainer and coach. The automated marketing
system that Reginald uses to explode his business opportunities as well as generate
multiple income streams can be found at
Conquer The Internet.
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