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Have you ever wondered how exactly search engine marketing works or how search engine optimization can help your business? Search engine marketing relies on the basic principles of search engine optimization. Search engine optimization makes it possible for a search engine’s spider to find your web page and add it to the search engine results page whenever someone does a search for a word or phrase that shows up on your website.

Search engine marketing uses search engine optimized content to make your website easier for the spiders to find and for people who are searching the web to find. A search engine uses thousands of little bots called spiders to index the millions of web pages that are on the Internet. These spiders start at the most well known websites and work backwards following links and searching for common words and phrases. Every page that the spiders come across with those particular words on them is indexed and saved. Those pages are the ones that show up in the search engine results page when someone uses Google or another search engine to look for websites on a particular topic.

The place where each site shows up in the search engine results page ranking is based on the content of the site, how many times particular words and phrases appear on the site and the relevance of the site to those search times. That is why search engine marketing depends so heavily on search engine optimization.

If you want your website to show up higher on the search engine results page then you use to use search engine marketing and search engine optimization techniques in order to get the spiders to notice your site and put your site higher on the search engine results page. People who are using a search engine to look for websites will rarely click to the second search engine results page.

It’s crucial that your site be on the first page of the search engine results page or people will probably not find your site. Using search engine marketing and search engine optimization is the best way to do that.

The number one rule to remember when you are planning out search engine marketing strategies or trying to figure out how use search engine optimization effectively on your website is that your website should have 100% original content.

The spiders will place your site higher on the search engine results page if the content that is on your site is original. When websites duplicate copy the spiders pick up on the repeated phrases and language and will sometimes not index a site at all if the spider determines that the content is too similar to the content on another site.

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing is more than just taking one word or phrase and repeating it a certain number of times. The content on the site has to be fresh and engaging and also contain the keywords or key phrases that will bring traffic to the website.

“Search engine friendly.”

Search engines all have their own confidential algorithms that determine which Web pages are to be shown first. The algorithms assign weights to certain components or variables that it finds within a page. There are MANY people who can design web pages but not many can built a search engine friendly and functional web sites.

3 Important Meta Tags.

META tags are HTML Tags that describe the contents of a web page. The primary purpose of Meta tags is to help catalog and categorize the contents of a web page. If your pages do not contain them then they may not get categorized the way you’d like by the search engines.

You should generally include a META keyword tag on your page within the section of a Web page area.

TITLE

Keep your title quite short and include words relating to your subject area and should include your targeted keyword

Work at home business resources for all

DESCRIPTION

The description tag should be kept between about 100-200 characters. The description should also include words about your subject area and should not simply restate the title of the page, as it should also describe the page.

KEY WORDS

Key words and/or phrases relating to your subject will also be inserted (comma separated), they should be between 200-500 characters long.

Meta tags are hidden in a document’s source, invisible to the reader. Some search engines, however, are able to incorporate the content of meta tags into their algorithms. No engines penalize sites that use meta tags properly, so it’s recommended that you always include them.

The tag of your Web page is the most important HTML tag or element. All the search engines consider the keywords in this tag and generally give those keywords a lot of importance in their ranking system. Therefore, if you were to create one page with a keyword in the title tag and another page with the same keyword in the body tag, the one with the keyword in the title will generally rank higher in most engines.

The text found in the META Description tag will be displayed to the user in the search results for many engines. Therefore, it pays to craft a good description so that you not only rank well, but so people will actually click on your link once they see it. When creating your Meta Description Tag you must adhere to the guidelines that the search engines have in place. For example, there is a limitation to the number of characters that you can use in your Meta Description. Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the search engines and directories use the keywords in the description as a way of determining if your site is relevant to the search performed. This is also where concepts and strategies like keyword proximity come into play and is a high factor for your search engine ranking.

A META keyword tag lists all the keywords for which you would like search engines to rank your site. Although not all search engines support this tag, you should use it for the ones that do.

One of the most important things that you can do for your web site and your search engine ranking to be indexed in the search engines is write a good description and title for your site. If you spend extra time on the title ,description, and tailor it so that it is definitive, concise, and follows all of the guidelines, your web site should not have a problem getting indexed and will positive for your search engine ranking.

Key element is your keywords. Keywords are the key to whether your site is seen in the search engines or not.

Most of the time when people use a search engine they search for common words or phrases like game, travel, music or business. These words are called “key words” or “keywords”. Because of this webmasters try to use key words that are likely to be searched for included within their page. The more often a key word shows up the more likely the page will rank higher in a search engine. If you over do it however you can actually be rejected by a search engine. That is why webmasters try to make each page relative to only one to three keywords. They then use those key words as the first words within their HTML meta tags, image tags, heading tags, title tag, text link tags, alt tags and even the file name of the page itself.

Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in vain! Don’t waste time optimizing for words that will never bring you any traffic.

Few tips for a search engine friendly website.

Keep it simple

Make your site easy to navigate. Give a site map so visitors can see a list of everything contained on the site. They can then use this as their reference point. Search engine spider can also easily follow all your links read it content and store them in the search engine database.

All the major search engines claim to favor pages with high-quality content. They claim that to rank well on their engine that you simply need to create relevant, high quality pages. Keywords should be relevant, applicable, and clearly associated with page body content.

Cloaking is normally associated with sites doing IP and USER-AGENT serving where the internet server will present a page that will vary based upon the visitor characteristics. No matter how great the content, is considered spam by all of the major search engines.

DO keep your content current.

There’s nothing worse than visiting a website in 2008 that was last updated in 1999.

Never Spam. The following techniques are usually considered spam:

Irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags

Meta refresh tags.

Invisible text and overuse of tiny text.

Excessive repetition and use of keywords

Overuse of mirror sites (same sites that point to different URLs)

Identical or nearly identical pages.

Submitting to an inappropriate category (for directories)

Never use link farms. Link farm are those services that generically link to your site if you agree to link to everyone else’s site that participates in the link exchange service. Theoretically, more the members of that service, more your link popularity.

Conclusions

Build a Search Engine friendly website. Do not break any search engine rules keep your site clean surely will earn a place in the search engines. Make your pages the best they can be for your users and search engines in general, and your site will do great!

About the Author: Hash is the president club member of SFIMG. A work at home business site.

http://www.work-home-business.com

Links are what seem to make the internet go ‘round and they certainly make it quick and easy to get from one page to another, or follow up on some background information on offer. However, when it comes to optimising your website and ranking well with major search engines like Google you will benefit from knowing as much as possible about the different links you can incorporate into your website’s design, and what each one can achieve.

The two main types of links your website should have to ensure its search engine optimisation, are one way links and reciprocal links.

One way links are exactly what they sound like, a link which is only a one way street, but the direction of that linking street is what is important to your website’s optimisation success, when all roads lead to your site. While one way links seem to be going against the grain of the interconnected nature of the internet, this sort of link building can actually be highly beneficial if you can achieve it in the first place.

However, the reason why one way links are so beneficial is actually the same reason they can be so hard to secure – having one way links, coming into your website means that your site is somewhere worth being, and therefore somewhere worth linking to. This is what search engines like to see as they only want to rank sites well which will be helpful to their searchers and if numerous other web users have deemed your site useful enough to link to, then the search engine gives this a lot of weight when determining your ranking.

To achieve one way links to your website though, you have to put in the hard work as there are no shortcuts to make users think your website is useful and informative when it isn’t. But it’s not impossible, as a dedicated SEO expert should be able to help your website reap the benefits of one way links.

Reciprocal links to your website however, are those which you actively seek from other websites, in return for your site linking back to theirs too. In reciprocating links to and from your own website, you are actively choosing to be associated with these other sites. This is why reciprocal links can actually sometimes do more harm than good to your site, because quality – as always – is more important than quantity.

This means that the websites you reciprocate links with must be relevant to your own website, company, business and online presence as while linking between sites is seen as a good thing by most search engines, this is only true if it is helpful to your website visitors. Reciprocating links with websites similar to your own will mean that the sites you link to will be just as helpful and relevant to your visitors as your own site, therefore in recommending your site to search engine users by awarding it a high ranking, the search engine knows there is plenty of useful, helpful and relevant information there for its searchers.

Building links into, and into and out of your website can help you move steadily up the most popular search engine rankings for your keywords. However, if overused or used incorrectly, link building can actually have the opposite effect, so now that you know the benefits of increasing your link popularity, seek out expert SEO advice on how to make links work for your site.

Search Engine Optimisation is a UK based company dedicated to getting your business into the top results on all the major search engines and keeping you there. At Search Engine Optimisation we can work with you to improve and optimise your existing website design, or offer you a leasing package on one of our established websites, already fully optimised and continually updated with new content and fresh designs. Regardless of your industry, the size or nature of your business or where you operate Search Engine Optimisation is committed to building and maintaining your online presence.

gines are the first things Internet surfers look for when they are searching for goods or services. Where your website appears to the visitors in their search results is of utmost importance. The objective of all Internet marketers is to ensure that their URLs appear right at the top of the first page or at least the first 50th position because visitors would tend to click only on the most prominent URLs.

This boils down to “Search Engine Optimization”, commonly referred to as “SEO” and it is also the holy grail of web design. There are many ways to optimize your site so that search engines will list your site higher in their rankings.

First and foremost, it is the “keyword”. Keywords are the foundation on which the entire search engine system works. If a top ranking site suddenly drops drastically, it may mean that certain content of the website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders and crawlers. Very often certain particular keyword or phrase has been ineffective due to fierce competition. For beginners, it is advisable to start with keywords which are not too competitive to at least get some traffic going first.

Hence, search engine optimization refers to the development of the right keyword strategies to ensure good ranking of your website. The most effective advertising technique online today is good placement in the search engines.

First thing you have to do is to choose your keywords wisely. There are a number of good sites that could help you select the right keywords (or phrases). One example of such free sites is http://inventory.overture.com. What you need to do is to enter your main site name and they would suggest the keywords in the order of search popularity.

Fill these keywords in the metatags first. As you would find in most good websites by clicking “View” and then “Source” within your web browser, the metatag description and keywords are always placed right at the top before the title and anything else. (Metatags are hidden HTML directions for Web browsers or search engines. They include important information such as the title of each page, relevant keywords describing site content and the description of the site that shows up when a search engine returns a search. Make sure your metatags accurately describe your content)

Also, ensure that your page title and your first page header use at least some of the same keywords. Bear in mind that the least amount of words you place in your title, the higher the weightage Google would give to each of your keywords thus improving your ranking.

Keywords should be carefully distributed through your well-written and edited text as well. However, do not over do it by sprinkling these keywords repeatedly over your page which would look funny and awkward to human eyes. If this happens, major search engines would treat this as search engine spam and you would not rank well.

As we have heard it so many times before, “Content is King”. Any websites relevant information to a specific niche is what Search Engines are looking for. The more content you have on your website, the greater would be your chances of enjoying a decent search engine ranking. After all, it is information that draws more and more people to the Internet every day.

Thousands of authors are giving away articles for free reprint, and these articles cover just about any subjects you could think of.

Search engine spiders move from site to site across the Internet by following hyperlinks. If your sites are linked to more high-quality and high-trafficked sites (i.e. websites with high Google Page Rank), you would be held at high regards by the search engines too. It is highly recommended that you register your site with well-known directories such as Yahoo (www.yahoo.com), Google.com and the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org). Search engine campaign and all the other necessary actions are to be carried out to increase your rankings.

The question is how to ensure that your prominence would continue. Therefore there must be a workable strategy to allow you to monitor and control your search engines positions. The ways search engines rank websites is not fixed and continue to change with time. Hence a top ranking website today could drop to the bottom of the page or even lost in subsequent pages. It is therefore advisable to create a system that could monitor your positions at least on a monthly basis.

Make an effort to know your competitor’s position against yours because their rise could lead to your drop. You can view their html codes as mentioned above. Do the necessary correction wherever applicable to improve your website to increase your position in search results based on the most popular search engines. (Some websites give information on the latest most popular list as this list is dynamic and keeps changing.

For webmasters, the major search engines are the most important places to be listed, because they can potentially generate so much traffic) If your search engine positions have suddenly dropped, search engines spiders may have found some problems with your website. Sometimes when you have changed the code, the spider may become confused and consequently drop your positions. If a spider happens to crawl at your website when it is down for changes, you could end up disappearing from a search engine index entirely.

At times, a search engine may change its formula, and suddenly all websites come up as irrelevant as mentioned earlier above. If that search engine is a current favorite like Google, your position in other search engines could also suffer due to the domino effect.

The idea behind ranking high in search engine such as Google is to analyze top ranking websites and find out what they are doing as regards keywords and do exactly those things plus the extra which they have overlooked. Search engine marketing campaign must be treated as a good medium to long-term investment because it entails a lot of effort and financial commitment.

Because approximately 85% of all internet users looking to buy online will place a keyword in the search box of a search engine, you had better have a good understanding of how to market your website to them.

I wrote this article to help you understand a little bit about how search engines work.

Search engine marketing was once the gold rush for online customer acquisition. When the internet was much smaller and search engine rankings was easier to come by, a business could earn top ten ranking and free traffic quite easily.

Today, through, competition has skyrocketed, and ranking in the top ten for leading search engines within the chosen keywords or phrases can be next to impossible. Additionally, search engine algorithms or the criteria they base relevancy against, change as frequently as once per month.

As a result, developing a website that meets the criteria for superior ranking results is the same as chasing a moving target. In any regard, the basic foundation is important in internet marketing today and why search engines are pay-per-click driven, discussed in detail in my book “The Newbies Guide To Internet Marketing.”

Portal vs. Search-Only Sites

Search engines have two basic styles – portal and search box focused. http://Yahoo.com is a portal site, along with http://Netscape.com and http://MSN.com. These engines, sometimes called directories, offer search, news, mail and other user features to encourage repeat visits and visibility.

Other search engines offer nothing aside from a search box. http://Google.com, http://DMOZ.org and http://AltaVista.com are search box based engines. Each time one searches these engines, he or she receives a listing, often many pages long, of relevant results listed according to their relevancy algorithm.

In either search style, results depend on inclusion within the engine’s extensive database, some using human edition and others fully automated, some requiring paid inclusion and others free. Results listings are called SERP’s or search engine result pages.

Search engines began in the early 1990’s to organize the growing online information sources. Since then, search engines have become one of the leading avenues for online business marketing. According to the Internet ranking source http://Alexa.com, Yahoo is the most visited site on the Internet, reaching an average of nearly 270 billion users, Google reaches an average of almost 150 billion users each day. Lycos averages nearly 5 billion, Netscape averages 4.3 billion and Alta Vista reaches nearly 5.5 billion users per day.

Studies also indicate search engines and links are the most effective method to reach users. According to GVU users survey, 85 percent of all new visitors currently arrive from search engines. Other strong marketing venues include word of mouth and print direct mail advertising.

Not all search engines are created equally. Each database is built on specific classes, such as visitor quantity, professionalism, search quality and target audience. The higher regarded search engines return the most relevant results and compile the most comprehensive resources for any given search. In addition to the all-inclusive search engines like http://Yahoo.com and http://google.com, other location or industry-specific search engines specialize in sites of interest, such as bed & breakfast, restaurants or art galleries. These are smaller, but offer more niche industry or geographic-based results.

Search engine marketing is tiered, each level offering a distinctly different service that the next. At the most basic level is search engine listing. Listing refers to registration in any given database. This does not guarantee ranking in the top search results, but does obtain consideration.

The next level up is search engine optimization or improving a website based upon current search engine algorithms – what they seek, how they label relevance, who they place first.

Search engine placement and positioning refers to particular rankings promise for given search terms or keywords. Because most people who search pay attention to the first three pages, if not the first page only, search engine positioning generally aims for top ten placements in the largest search engines. It’s one thing to be included in a database and another thing completely to actually be found among the millions upon millions of searchers reading only the first few results.

Keywords

To rank relevantly within search engine results, each website must be considered relevant to a particular search algorithm for a given keyword or phrase. Keyword selection can be a challenge to both experts and neophytes. While anyone can come up with various words that may be used when searching for their product or service, these words may not be the ideal mix for search engine ranking. Why? If a marketer chooses a popular keyword phrases, he or she and a million other businesses compete for top placement. Top SERP placement is dense, searchers typically giving up after the first three pages. To succeed, one must use relevant keywords that are not being used by everyone else and that are searched for quite often. This may include misspellings and other alternative data. After finding relevant keywords and phrases, the results must encourage conversion or success based on each business’ criteria. For example, while it may be possible for a DVD rental firm to get top listings under the search criteria “free DVD rentals”, the person who visits is looking for free merchandise and will leave if its not found.

For optimal search engine rankings, a page will be optimized for only one to two popular but non-competitive keywords or keyword phrases.

Needless to say there are far more aspects to marketing to search engines than I can cover in this article but the information provided here should give you a good insight into understanding how important it is to design a website that is search engine friendly.

Article Summary:

Search engines are the #1 tool people use when shopping for products, services or information online. Properly promote your site to search engines and watch your traffic explode. If you gain an understanding of how to properly promote your website your efforts will reach it’s full potential.

Don’t give up! If at first you don’t succeed, TRY, TRY, AGAIN! There is a lot to learn when starting a online business. Give yourself a break and don’t set unrealistic goals. Contrary to popular beliefs, having a successful, profit making, online business doesn’t happen overnight.

So, Good Luck, Make Money and Have Fun Doing It – Shirley Kelly