Category Archives: Optimisation

PPC: Think Before You Pay

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation, Search Engines
search engine optimisation auckland

SEO – incremental growth in traffic and enquiries

Are you considering using Pay Per Click (or PPC) advertising to grow your online sales? While PPC advertising channels like Google’s Adwords or Facebook Adverts has the benefits of immediate traffic and can cope with seasonal events, it is also very expensive and complicated to run.

Adwords and SEO (search engine optimisation) are competing and complimentary online marketing strategies. In Adwords you bid for position on the search results pages against your competitors. The budget required is generally well over $1,000 per month and few small businesses can afford it.

SEO works to bring your web site up higher and higher on the organic or unpaid results on the search results pages and a monthly budget of $300- $500 is required of a 6 month period. Ideally SEO would be ongoing.

Five Reasons to Think before you Pay of Adwords

  1. Adwords is really expensive
    Especially since April this year when Google changed the page layout of its search results pages to remove the right hand column of ads, thereby reducing the number of ads displayed per page load and making those remaining more expensive to bid for.
  2. No audit of click fraud
    What say your competitor saw your ad and clicked on it? Who pays for that? Google says they have a way to monitor and mitigate click fraud, but honesty, how can they? They wont disclose how they do this, so we cant test their claim. It would not take too much effort to make clicks on Adwords ad appear to be authentic.
  3. No investment in your site
    While you are distracted monitoring daily bids and monthly budgets in Adwords, you are missing the biggest opportunity: your website. You could be investing time in new content, on-page optimisation, new inbound links and myriad of other strategies to funnel traffic to your site… for free.
  4. People tend to ignore sponsored ads
    A recent survey revealed that 82-percent of people claim to ignore sponsored listings when searching via Google. Think about it; do you tune out advertising when you search on Google or post a status update on Facebook? When you are truly task focused, you never look at ads. One web marketing company recently said:  Overall, the study finds that online ads are ignored by the largest share of respondents (82%)  …the survey indicates that banner ads are ignored by the largest share of respondents overall (73%), followed by social media ads (62%) and search engine ads (59%). In each case the propensity to ignore ads rises alongside age – by a significant degree. (source)
  5. People are skeptical of advertising
    People have become skeptical of advertising, including PPC. Marketing efforts are looked upon negatively because, people know that you are trying to sell them something. And people don’t like to be sold or having advertisement constantly presented when they are trying to surf the web, pay a bill or browse status updates on their favorite social networks.

Summary: Adwords and PPC advertising are becoming more and more expensive and is out of reach of smaller companies. SEO activities, like building content, building inbound links and directory listings persist far beyond the month they were created in… and cost half the price. Adwords is renting the house: SEO is buying the house.

 

Select the Best Keywords for Your Web Site

Posted on by Posted in Keywords, Optimisation, Search Engines

Find below Dynamic Web Solution’s easy three step program to select killer keywords for your website.

1. How to Find the Best Keywords or Search Terms

Firstly, find out what your competitors think are good keywords for your industry class or product type. They may be completely wrong, but it is worth checking and it only takes a few moments. Here’s how…

  1. Go to three of your closest competitor’s websites
  2. On the homepage go View > Source
  3. Look for two lines of code at the top of the page that look like <meta name=”description”… and <meta name=”keywords”…
  4. Make a short list of search terms you think are worthwhile

Now, go and test your short list of these keywords on Google Keyword Planning Tool. You will need a Google account to log in. Select the country on the right that is relevant to your website, then supply a single phrase that you want your website to come up under.

For the keyword “real estate”, see how “house for sale” is also searched on thousands of times per month. Who would have guessed?

Recap: looking at your competitor’s web sites and using a keyword planning tool has a single purpose: to get real about what people are actually searching on. NOT what you think they are searching on, but what they are actually searching on. It is a litmus test. You are looking for synonyms to your search phrases.

Tip: the keywords you choose are not in fact words, but phrases. There are too many web pages that conform to a single word so people search using phrases.

 2. How do I Add my Killer Keywords to My Web Site?

Much has been written on this topic, so what follows are broad principles and not specific instructions.

So, you have your shortlist of keyword phrases and you now need to work them into your website – in such a way as to make it 100% clear to search engines what your site is all about.

But not all places on a webpage are equal as the following list explains.

  1. The <title> tag is glowing white hot. If you only do one thing, make sure each page of your web site has keywords in the title tag specific to that page. Many webpages are listed as “Untitled” in search engine results. These sites are missing the single biggest opportunity they have to present keywords phrases.
  2. The first link on your homepage is also burning hot for search engines. Try to include at least one keyword in it.
  3. The first main heading on your page (H1 or H2 tags) is burning hot. Tell those search engines what the page is about.
  4. The first para on the page is the one that introduces the subject of the page. It is cooler, but still very important. Add your keywords to it.
  5. Likewise, the closing para sums up the page. Put your keywords in it.

Any body familiar with direct mail marketing (now a thing of the past) will see some parallels between the above hierarchies and writing sales letters.

Recap: What does all this mean? It means that there are some parts of your page that are scrutinised more closely than others. Use this logic to present your keywords to search engines.

Tip:you are looking for 5% (not more) keyword density on your chosen phrase(s). Use www.seocentro.com/tools/seo/keyword-density.html to calculate your keyword density in relation to your competitor’s sites.
Tip 2: make sure your page is comprised of valid hypertext mark up. Go to http://validator.w3.org to make sure.
Tips 3:if your site is made with frames or Flash, get a web designer to rewrite it with tables or divs and css. Frames and Flash are old and out moded.

3. Evaluation: well, did it work?

To evaluate the success of the work above you need a ranking report. A ranking report takes your web address and chosen keyword phrase(s) and looks for your position or “ranking” on search engines.

There are free tools that do this like www.serps.com/tools/rank_checker but they tend to be blunt and not very helpful. If Dynamic Web Solutions made your web site, it is likely that we are submitting it to search engines and can give you a free emailed report of your search engine ranking on the leading search engines.

Summary:

  1. Compile a short list of keyword phrases you are going to target after researching competitor’s sites and using reverse look up tools like Goolge’s Keyword Planner
  2. Work these keyword phrases into strategic parts of your web pages
  3. Review with ranking reports at 12 week intervals. Google Analytics will provide traffic and visitor stats that will show you what your gains are.

If you have done the above, you will be clear what your objective is and you will have a subjective means of evaluating your progress.

This article was written by Peter Mitchell of Dynamic Web Solutions Pty Ltd

Building Quality Backlinks

Posted on by Posted in How Tos, Optimisation, Uncategorized

To do well on Google.co.nz you will have to get inbound links from quality web sites. By quality I mean sites with high Google Page Rank™ (you can check a site’s PR here).

These links are often referred to as “backlinks“. You will need 150+ backlinks coming into your site to get any traction on Google’s search results pages or “SERPs”. This is obviously a major undertaking and this article discusses how to approach inbound links.

You can start at Open Link Profiler. Enter your web address in the search box and this site will give you a report on who links to your site. You may be surprised who is linking to you, and you may even want to request some sites remove links to your site. Most people find they have very few links, and this is a situation you need to reverse.

The Open Link Profiler tool will list off who is linking to you, but more importantly if you search on your competitor’s pages, it will list off their links. This is valuable information as the list will contain websites and pages with high PageRank™ that you may not be aware of. These links may be free and with a little communication, you can get a quality backlinks to your site.

So, you know who is already linking to you, and you have a list of quality sites that don’t link to you but that do link to your competitors, its time to hit the phone or email and request these missing, high PageRank links.

Note that Dynamic Web Solutions can report on backlinks for you and contrast your site with one or two others in a table report. This makes it very easy to spot which links you could be going after.

What about outbound links?

Similarly, you can improve your reputation with Google by linking to quality sites – sites with high PageRank. This demonstrates that you are a good Internet citizen and are focused on your customers, not just your own interests.

Backlinks Q&A

Should I touch zero PR sites? Only if you have no links. Best left alone otherwise.

Should I pay for links? Can the site requesting payment prove that they can direct traffic to you, and not just any traffic but people ready to buy? Is their price per click lower than Google Adwords?

Timeframe. Ideally you would do linking work slowly and consistently over some months as getting too many links to fast indicates to Google an optimiser is at work. If you don’t have the time or inclination to do this work, please contact Dynamic Web Solutions as we are doing linking work all the time.

Other

Use the search box to see backlinks

Using advanced search options, you can search for websites which have linked to your website at all the major search engines.  Type the italicized, red text into the search engine, and it will give you a list of all the sites it has found that link to your site.  Of course, you have to replace www.domainname.com with your domain name!

  • Go to Google and search for link:www.domainname.com Remember, Google syndicates its search results, so there is no need to search for links to your site on any of the sites which use Google results (AOL, Netscape, Disney’s Go.com, Alexa, and iWon).
  • Go to MSN and search for link:www.domainname.com
  • Go to Yahoo! and search for link:http://www.domainname.com

Turn Google’s PageRank tool on and off in Chrome

On the right side of the Toolbar, click the wrench icon
Go to the Privacy tab > Enhanced features.
To turn on PageRank, check the box next to “PageRank” . To turn it off, uncheck it.
Click Save.

I Have Made My Website, What Is Next?

Posted on by Posted in How Tos, Optimisation, Search Engines

What's next?During the construction of your website we have been focusing on design, layout and technical issues and not focusing on marketing the site. It won’t take you long to realise that web marketing is as bigger job, if not bigger, than actually making a website.  It is also an area in which a lot of money is changing hands at present, and probably this trend will continue into the future. So what is next?

1. Links, Links, Links

You need to immediately find inbound links to your site. The first place to start is with directory websites such as Localist, Yellow Pages or Finda. Make sure you have a pin and a listing on Google Maps – which is very important for mobile searches. Do not delay in this task.

Getting inbound links from other websites greatly advantages you in two ways:

  1. firstly you start getting traffic from the link as soon as it is live
  2. secondly Google will have more conduits into your site and therefore will find your site easily and index it more quickly.

More importantly though is that each inbound link into your website will be viewed as a vote of confidence by Google and the other major search engines. The more votes of confidence that Google collects on your site the higher it will move you up the search results pages.

It’s worth mentioning two Google resources at this point: the Google tool bar and the Google website for Webmasters. The Google Toolbar has an important tool on it that measures the current page’s PageRank™. PageRank™ it is a patented Google technology that ranks pages according to Google’s own special algorithm. The Toolbar will show you the rank of any page from one to 10, 10 being the best.

Even large websites that have good traffic find it difficult to get a high page rank. If your site has a page rank of five, that would be very good. The Google website for Webmasters is an interesting place to find out what Google recommends in terms of linking and optimisation. It’s a good place to start and offers an excellent orientation to the world of search.

2. On Page Optimisation

You should be careful not to remove critical keywords or keyword phrases from your website. Your homepage in particular should repeat your most important keywords a number of times. The WordPress content management system has special, page by page title, description and keywords fields for you to complete. You will find these fields underneath the WYSIWYG editor. The three that start with “Meta” are the ones to focus on.  Meta means “information about information”. These three fields gives you the opportunity to feed information to search engines directly.

But on-page optimisation is about a lot more than just meta tags. In fact everything on a page: its headings, the amount of text, the frequency and density of keywords, how the HTML is structured… all count towards its PageRank™.  Ideally, each page on your site would be optimised for a different search phrase. You will need expert help with this, see the “SEO” link above.

3. Build E-mail Lists

E-mail marketing is cheap and fast. You will need to study up on issues of compliance regarding the Spam act, but if you can satisfy these requirements, e-mail can add real dollars to your bottom line. There is no need to hesitate, you can simply start collecting e-mail addresses and sorting them into groups immediately in your desktop mail client.

Once you get over a couple of hundred e-mail addresses you will need a more robust e-mail marketing solution (than sending e-mail from your desktop) as most ISPs choke large volumes of outbound e-mail.  This will include a third-party websites such as mailchimp.com who will report on bounced mail and report on who clicked what links in your outbound email. Mailchimp has HTML templates that allow you to dress your email up, but note that a plain text email will pass through spam filters more easily than its HTML counterpart. This is because spam filters look for hypertext links and images in email and can falsely categorise you HTML email as spam.

Mailchimp also has mobile apps so you can monitor “campaigns” (outbound messages) and see stats on your lists and sent mail. You can also use these apps to harvest email at your POS or tradeshow stall, say in conjunction with the chance to win some product or service. More on email marketing here.

4. Accelerate with Google Ads

You may wish to consider a Google Adwords campaign – although Adwords have become quiet pricey as more and more people compete for the same keywords. You probably need to allow a budget of $500 -$1,000 per month as a starting point.

It is going to take some time to get the search engine position that you want – more than 3 months and probably more than 9 months. If you are not working on linking as described above then your website will never really perform very well on search engines. If you need immediate traffic to your site from Google then you may consider running a Google ad campaign for the first 3 to 6 months after your website goes live. Here is more discussion on paying for ads on Google’s Adwords platform.

5. Social Networking

There is still a lot to understand about social networking and how it can be used to market websites. Be wary of hyperbolic statistics that do not relate to NZ and Australia as social networking sites are used much more in the US and UK.

Also, social networking does not apply to every type of business e.g. pubs and clubs do well with Facebook when promoting a visiting band. A manufacturer will not do well; they will collect 12 “likes” and 2 “friends” and their Facebook page will float out there as negative advertising.

Although there are some spectacular examples of social networking creating massive traffic to a website, in most cases there is an enormous amount of time invested in building an audience before networking would produce any money. Many businesses for example have a Facebook page and use it to interact with their customers but converting this  interaction into sales is tricky and can even contravene the user policies of the social networking site. So while it might be good to start to understand more about Facebook and Twitter there is a lot more water to go under the bridge before they become everyday marketing tools.

SEO Misconceptions

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation, Search Engines

Search Engine Submission – all the major search engines offer a URL submission page where you can tell the search engine a new site exists and you want them to visit and index its pages. Search engine submission is now futile – and has been for years –  as Google returns to your site every 4 days looking for changes! As soon as your site is linked from anywhere, it can be found.

Keyword Meta Tag – is a little line of code in the header area of a web page. Widely abused and therefore no longer useful eg. spammed with “sex”, “free”, “Olympics”. It has been ignored by the major search engines for probably the last decade – yet many web site owners believe its the magic bullet and all you have do to come up in the search results pages.

Paid search helps bolster organic results – wishful thinking! Some people believe paying for Google ads boasts your organic results. This would be illogical: why would Google undermine their advertising revenue by giving away position to advertisers who are prepared to pay for it. Illogical. There is no relationship between paid and organic search results.

Domain names with keywords – maybe this was a ranking factor 6-7 years ago and lead to some over registration activity with people registering 100s of names. No evidence today to suggest domain names with keywords works better than without.  However, having multiple domain names that resolve to a single web site IS a useful thing to have, but for non-SEO reasons.

Traffic gets traffic – “all I need to do is get my friends to click on my web site and Google will see how popular it is and move it up the page“. Complete rubbish. If it were only that easy!

Things my mate said I must have – your mate doesn’t know, can’t know and following their advice will get you off to a bad start. The web and SEO practices are changing too fast for the opinionated amateur to keep a handle on it.

My kid/brother-in-law/neighbours dog said they could make my website – very bad idea because:

  1. They don’t get around to it… and while it remains unmade, you are losing potential business
  2. Young people tend to be focused on form and not function, whereas purchasers – normally older – are focused on function. Its the difference between your website being “cool or tool”.
  3. They use free or very cheap services that are limited (eg. no email or storage space) and in far-off lands (ie. no support).
  4. They are focused on making it work in a browser window and not making it work on a search engine, totally different skills sets.

Summary: you’re probably an expert in what you do right? Would you get an amateur to do your taxes, spray paint your car? No, you would take it to someone who knows.

Link Your Website

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation, Search Engines

Disclaimer: nothing that you read below has been confirmed or approved in any way by major search engines such as Google. At best it is a summary of what industry commentators say about successful linking strategies. Some of these have been tested, but many can not be proved with testing and must be considered speculation.

Introduction – life before Search Engines

Unbelieveably there was a time on the web when there were no search engines. So how did people find web sites? They traversed links from one site to another. This act became known as “surfing the web“, or “browsing the web”. Therefore, in the very first years of the world wide web, people who made web sites knew they had to both link out and get links into their web site.

This focus was lost as commercial interests quickly entered the Internet in the late 90’s and weren’t that keen on linking out to other sites for fearing losing traffic. Some even wanted to control who linked into them.

Today search engines strongly reward sites that have good links exiting and entering them. This is the reason why you should spend time cultivating links.

How to Find Good Inbound Links

Browse the web, its as simple as that. To break it down

  • Go to a search engine and search on a topic close to or strongly related to your web site’s topic. In other words you are going to theme your links, i.e. group them by topic
  • Find a number of sites you like and you believe would add value to your web site in the eyes of your users. If you have the Google tool bar installed, aim for sites with a 3, 4 or 5 page rank. If you do not have the Google tool bar, get it. You going to need it.
  • Pen an email to the owner (or call them) and suggest a link trade between your site and theirs. Remember email can be caught in spam traps and can be easily ignored, so a call maybe more effective
  • When they agree add their details to a spreadsheet of links you are forming (column headings could be date, web address, email address, date requested, spoke to, sent my link)
  • Then check back in a few weeks and see if they have added your link. If not, send a reminder

Reverse Links

Finding out who is currently linking to you, and who linked to you after you approached them for a link is very simple. Go to www.yahoo.com and search on link:www.yourdomain.com.au. Obviously substitute yourdomain, with your domain name. You can do a similar search on Google, but inexplicably its results are no where near as comprehensive. Note also, that if you just use link:yourdomain.com.au you will get different results. If you only have a handful of reverse links, you are in trouble and need to address that as soon as possible.

How to Present your Outbound Links

There are two preferred ways to present your links on your link parter’s web site.

  1. You could just ask them to add a link under existing text in a para on their site
  2. or you could provide them with a para of text with your web site title above it in bold as the link

Two is the most common approach, as you get the opportunity of optimising the text around your link with further keywords. Follow up is going to be critical. People may agree quickly to give you a link and then do nothing. You will have to chase them.

Timeframe to Success

This is a good question, and it has two answers:

  • the benefits of linking are immediate in the sense that you will get traffic from your link partner’s site as soon as they upload the page with your link on it and their site visitors can see it. The volume of this traffic depends on how busy their site is. If it is an obscure resource with a low page rank, then the benefit will be minimal but if it is a high trafic site, you will get a share of that traffic.
  • the benefits of linking in terms of the SERPs are less immediate. A 9 to 12 month period is minimum. So the sooner you start the sooner you get results.

How Many Links Should I Get?

The short answer is as many as you can. Another short answer may be, many more than your best competitor. A dozen links may get your site on the radar. Twenty links will start your ascent on the SERPs, 60 to 100 and your are starting the blitz your competition and look very important in the eyes of search engines.

Tip: do not add more than 60 links per page as this page may be consider spam to the search engines.

So What Does Google say About its Search Engine?

Google is not completely silent on it’s search engine. It publishes guidelines to webmasters and summary information about it’s technology. It does not however confirm specific strategies that webmaster may believe to be effective. Interestingly the main thrust of Google’s comments is to focus on your content: create great, compelling content and they will reward you. In other words, make your web site good for your human audience and we will do the rest.

In my experience as a web developer, I know that the hardest thing for people to create is compelling content. It is a challenge. One well worth pursuing though.

Should I Pay for Links?

Obviously the process described above is lengthy and requires ongoing attention. Like a garden, you have to tend it. If you find that you are not securing 3 or 4 links each month, you should outsource this task.

A warning though, if you outsource you will not have hands on control, or any oversight of who your site links to and who links back to you. This will be in the link traders hands.

Similarly, you should NOT pay for any single inbound link unless the person offering it for sale can demonstrate to you that it is worth the price they are asking for it. Your web stats will tell you if the link you are considering buying is worth it. With web stats you will be able to monitor all inbound traffic. If you get 50 hits a month from their site, and your Google adsense click through price is .50 cents, dont pay more than $25.00 per month

Is That It?

By no means, there are many more things you can do to “optimise” your site for search engines. Links are important though, and you have to cover this early. Other ideas and issues concerning optimisation will be included in this blog.

Glossary

SERPS, search engine results pages, that is the results that come up when you use Google and Yahoo. This screen has “sponsored” or paid for ads on it and “natural” results.

PageRank, this is a Google trademarked tecnology, according to Google

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Optimisation is the process of analysing a web site for the prominance of its chosen keywords and then maximising the prevalence of these keywords throughout a web site. It also includes a good in and out bound linking strategy. Keyword analysis is covered elsewhere in this blog: see Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI,

This article was written by Peter Mitchell of Dynamic Web Solutions Pty Ltd
Copyright 2008

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Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation

The Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI  compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results.

Suppose the number of searches for a keyword is 486 per month and Google displays 214,234 results for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 486 divided by 214,234. In this case, the KEI 0.002.

The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. That means that you might have a better chance of getting to the top.

The KEI for a keyword should decrease if it becomes more competitive. Competitiveness is defined as the number of sites which a search engine displays when you search for that keyword using exact match search.

Example:

Suppose the popularity of a keyword is 4 (this number is found with tools like keyworddiscovery.com) and a search engine displays 100 sites for that keyword. Then the ratio between popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 4/100 = 0.04.

Suppose now that both the popularity (more searches on that keyword) and the competitiveness (more sites that conform to that search) of a keyword or phrase increases. Assume that the popularity increases to 40 and a search engine now displays 1000 sites for that keyword. Then the ratio between popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 40/1000 = 0.04. That is, the same KEI as above.

Hence, the keyword has the same ratio between popularity and competitiveness as before. However, as is obvious, the keyword would be far more attractive in the second case. If the popularity is only 4, there’s hardly any point in spending time trying to optimize your site for it even though you have a bigger chance of ending up in the top 30 since there are only 100 sites which are competing for a top 30 position. Each hit is no doubt important, but from a cost-benefit angle, the keyword is hardly a good choice.

However, when the popularity increases to 40, the keyword becomes more attractive even though its competitiveness increases. Although it is now that much more difficult to get a top 30 ranking, spending time in trying to do so is worthwhile from the cost benefit viewpoint.

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Not All Paras Are Equal

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation

In the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), not all paragraphs are equal. For example a search engine will treat the first para on your page as more important than the second para and the third.

In fact the paras cool off in importance as the page lengthens… until the final para which is assumed to contain summary information and therefore warm up in importance.

This means you should present your important keywords in your first para.
Don’t miss this important opportunity.

The same is true of links. The first link on your page is glowing red hot for search engines. Make sure it has a good keyword in it.

The same is true of headings on a page.  A top level heading in an <h1> tag gets more importance attributed to it than an <h2> and <h3> tag.

Summary: selected areas of your web pages are being examined more closely than others. Make sure the first link, heading and para of each of your pages carries your important keywords.

Keywords Meta Tag – Trashed!

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation, Search Engines

Many web site owner’s have been told that there is a magic “meta” something that you use for keywords and your site comes up number one, Bob’s your uncle.

 While there may have been some truth in this 5 or 6 years ago, some naughty web site developers packed so many useless and misleading keywords into the keyword meta tag that search engine companies had no choice but to walk away from it as a means of sorting out the relevancy of sites to various searches.

The “four majors”; Google, Yahoo, MSN and All the Web are ignoring the keyword meta tag. Other smaller engines may still look at it, but only assign minimal credibility to it.

Summary:
The game is over for the keyword meta tag. Keyword stuffing made it useless.
You will have to look to over areas and structure fo your html documents to present your chosen keywords.

SEO – The Basics You Should Know

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation, Other Authors

by Alan Lim

SEO is the acronym for search engine optimization. This title refers to the process of improving the page ranking of your web site through careful use of keywords, keyword placement and links to and from other web sites.

What is it?

SEO is a carefully created method of improving the probability of your web page appearing on the results page of a search engine query. The nearer to the top of the search engine results page your web site appears, the more likely that searchers will click on the link to your web site and go on to purchase the product or service you represent. You can perform search engine optimization yourself, or hire an expert to do it for you. There are approved ways to improve your standing and ways that can get you banned. It’s important that you do the optimization correctly to avoid getting your web site shut down.

Who needs it?

Any small business owner with products or services advertised online should make the effort to optimize their web site so as to achieve the best results when the search engine spiders visit your site. There are SEO algorithms that are used that are generally proprietary and different search engines look for different components in order to determine the rank of the specific web page. Naturally, each web site owner wants to achieve the highest possible page ranking for the products or services that are displayed on the web site. Getting your page ranking as near to the top of the search results as possible gives you more web browsers seeing your link.

How to get the best results

The best results for SEO is to determine the specific algorithm used by a particular search engine and write your web site to use the best possible mix of keywords, links, and placement so as to improve your ranking. Attention should be paid to using the keywords or keyword phrases correctly. Not only the number of times they are used, but in what context they are used. Even the placement of keywords on the page is important for best results. Another factor that is important is that of links to other web pages.

How does SERP apply?

SEO best results are returned on the SERP or Search Engine Results Page. When a searcher on the internet uses terms in a search engine query box, the search engine returns results on a page called the Search Engine Results Page. This can be a few links up to thousands of links, but few searchers look beyond the first page or two of results, since the results often are less relevant as you move further down the page. The ranking of your web page up toward the top of the list is what can increase your sales significantly.

Page rankings

Page rankings are the somewhat arbitrary number assigned to web pages based on the SEO results identified by the search engine spiders or robots. Each major search engine relies on a different algorithm for ranking, although there are similarities between the three major search engines, MSN. Yahoo and Google. The goal of search engine optimization techniques is to have the web page appearing on the first page of search results for the specific query.

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About the Author
Optimization techniques and resources information can be found at Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the goal of each business and web site owner in order to increase the sales revenue for the product or service.