A Guide to SEO For Newbies
August 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Google and other search engines are the gateway to your business, and getting high page ranks somewhere in the first page of listings, is important for driving business to your site. There are companies out there that will promise you the moon, the stars, and, by the way, page rankings so high that you’ll cheerfully pay them hundreds of dollars every month for their services.
The best way is to try to get free organic website traffic, meaning when someone searches for a term or phrase in the search engine, those pages that come up are “organic” type listings. Being on page one is highly desirable as few people search beyond the first one or two pages listed. This is different than the paid ads you see on the right hand side of the page, other wise known as “pay per click” ads. Trying to get listed at a high page rank is known as search engine optimization or SEO and boils down to:
1. Content is King. You need real content on your web site; this is content that has real meaning to real people, not just keyword stuffing. Search engines send out programs called web crawlers or web spiders that index web sites. The number one thing those web crawlers are looking for is content. They determine if a web site has content by tracking keyword phrases. This is why search engine optimization usually starts by picking keywords and writing content around them; a lot of web site marketing gurus advocate keyword stuffing well past the point of sanity and effectiveness. Anything more than about 2-4% of the words in an article and the web sites will filter it out it’s too obviously “gaming the system”.
2. Links back to your site from other’s sites provide validation. The more links particularly links that relate to your site’s content, the higher your page ranking will be. Methods to get link backs range from link exchanges with other websites in related topics, to writing articles about the topic you’re dealing with, to social bookmarking sites and such.
3. Updated, and expanding content. You can’t just put a page up and expect to keep the same page ranks. Your site needs to have new material, this is important not just for web spiders, but for human visitors as well. If they can expect to see something new and interesting at least three times a week, they’ll keep coming back and it takes an average of seven visits before someone decides to either post in a forum or buy something in a shopping cart.
4. Web layouts that make sense. Your web site should have clean navigational links, your front page should have links to everything else on your site.
5. Text rules everything in web content. Search engine spiders ignore Javascript, they ignore graphics, and until very recently, they couldn’t read text in Flash animations. If the search engine spiders can’t read it, it doesn’t get used to help your page rankings.
The real trick for long haul success to search optimization is to ensure your website is as easy to use as possible. Make it simple to navigate for visitors who want to read about your site and content that makes them come back.
