The meaning is pretty simple to figure out, but here are some specifics. Duplicate content is a block of content which is very similar or the same that is contained on two or more domains. It can also include the similar or the same articles being displayed on your website in two different areas.

Duplicate content is becoming more relevant, especially with many Internet users now turning to their cell phones to access the Internet. In order to meet the needs of cell users, some websites choose to display one version of the site for regular users and another version for cell or

Before those questions are answered, let’s look into what good quality content on your website really is. When the text is being written for your website, you need to make sure that your target audience will be able to understand what they are reading. If your website is aimed at doctors for example, you do not want your content to be too simple. If the writing on your website is written below or above the level of reader that will be your main user, they are unlikely to make a return visit to your website.

One of the most important aspects of the writing on your website is the use of keywords and the keyword saturation. The writing should be focused around the keywords or keyword terms that your website is using. The keywords however, should only be used in three to five percent of the total content on a page. Any higher saturation than this, the search engines may believe that your website is trying to spam the search engine.

Now that we know a couple of important points about website writing that is search engine friendly, we can delve into whether or not it is all your website needs in order to rank well.

Yes, having high quality writing with proper keywords and keyword saturation on your website is really important. It is not however the only thing you need to do in order to rank well in Google and the other search engines. Google and other search engines have a number of factors which they take into account. Quality content writing is only one of the factors. Other factors include; inbound links, proper html code, important content and popularity.

If you have optimized writing on your website, it is surely not going to hurt. It will help a little but it will not move your website to the top. If you only have good writing but none of the other important factors that the search engines look for, your website may move up a spot or two but it will not necessarily make your website visible in the search engines. In order to have the biggest advantage, your website needs to be properly optimized in all SEO areas not just one of them.

It is nearly impossible to pinpoint an exact price for SEO services. Every professional has their own set of prices and provides quotes based on the project which is being presented to them and the time it is going to take them to complete the optimization to your website.

When SEO is concerned, most professionals work on an ongoing basis. Websites do just get optimized once and then the project is complete. It is a process which is continuous and ongoing. After the initial optimization is performed, you may not need a professional as often as you do in the beginning, but you still need someone to maintain and make future SEO changes to your website.

SEO is normally done in “campaigns” and can last anywhere from a month to years. An SEO campaign is a marketing campaign for your website. When looking for an SEO professional or company, there are many to choose from. Some have been in business for many years while others only for a few months. A professional who has not been in business for very long will usually cost less than those who have been in business longer.
SEO projects are normally contracted for a certain period of time. The time period can be as short as one month or as long as six months or a year. Most SEO professionals charge on a monthly basis. Some charge by the hour while others charge by the project.

Now let’s get down to the actual cost. In the United States, prices typically range from a few hundred dollars per month to over a thousand dollars a month depending on the professional and the total scope of the project. Larger websites (think major online shopping stores and major news outlet websites) can run thousands per month for SEO.

Do not let this scare you however. Most SEO professionals will tailor a package that will suit your needs. If your website is well optimized but is lacking inbound links and quality content writing, you can have a package designed around those two items.

Much like buying a car, with SEO, you get what you pay for. While good SEO professionals have prices which vary, you should be hesitant of any company which offers you prices which are way below what other companies have quoted you. You want a company that will get you results, not one which will provide you the lowest prices.

For small to medium sized companies who would like to use SEO to market their websites, the cost can be intimidating. The cost however is not any more expensive than traditional marketing methods such as print ads and television commercials. Your website needs SEO to make it to the top of the search engine results. After your website is at the top, the cost of SEO will seem minimal.

Deciding how many keyword phrases you should target can be a frustrating process. The first step is to find good quality keywords which are relevant to your website’s purpose. If your website is about car collecting, you may want to use phrases such as “car collecting”, “classic car collecting” and “collecting cars”.

Play around with phrases that users will commonly search for in the search engines. You want to be specific enough with your keywords that you will get users which are searching for the information you have, but you also do not want to use broad terms such as “cars”. If you use general or common keywords, you will be competing with every other website that contains that word. That’s a big market to be in!

Next, you need to decide just how many phrases you want to use. Remember, these are words and phrases that need to be included in the writing on your website. If you use too many phrases, the writing will look weird to users and it will not make sense. You will also need to pick keyword phrases for every page on your website. You do not just want to concentrate on the main page or the page which provides the most information.

If you include more than three to five keyword phrases, the search engines may view this as spamming. You never want to make a search engine think you are spamming it due to the fact that it could get your website penalized or even banned in the index. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you also do not want to use too few keyword phrases or the search engine may not be able to learn enough about your website.

The general rule of thumb is that you should use no less than two keyword phrases per page, but no more than five. Five is really pushing it but if integrated properly, five can work with pages that include a lot of content on them. When thinking about this, think about keyword density as well. As mentioned, you do not want the writing to look strange to users. If you have an article that is 500 words long and you are including 4 keyword phrases, it can be a stretch. You would need to repeat these terms within the 500 word article so that they consume three to five percent of the article.

Frankly, SEO does really work if proper SEO is used. Your website does need good search engine optimization performed on it if you want to give your website a fair shot of being listed high in the search engine results. Inbound links, quality writing, quality content and proper keyword use are all very important in natural SEO. Many spend thousands of dollars on banner ads and pay per clicks ads every month only to find that their products aren’t selling, their services are not being used or no one is reading their website content. Paid “unnatural” website advertising such as pay per click ads also need to be constantly monitored and tracked. Many website owners do not have the time to properly monitor their advertising on their own.

Good SEO can do the same thing as those expensive advertising methods. That’s not to say that you should never use pay per click advertising or banner advertisements, but they shouldn’t be the heart of your website’s advertising. By making a few changes to your website and gaining inbound links, SEO can give your website an excellent opportunity to be part of the top ranked websites.

If this is all true, then why does SEO sometimes get a bad rap? As with any business, there are those out there with practice unethical SEO techniques. These unethical SEO companies and professionals perform what’s called “black hat” SEO. Their SEO tactics include spamming the search engines and placing automated programs which try and trick the search engines into seeing something on a website that isn’t there or vice versa.

There are also SEO professionals out there that will take your money but will not optimize your website at all. If they do, it is very minimal and will not help your search engine rankings. These so called “professionals” prey on the people which know little to nothing about SEO.

There are bad apples in every business out there and SEO is not an exception. While SEO is not a scam by any means, you do need to check out the professional or company before you decide who you are going to use for your website’s SEO. A good company should be able to provide you with several references and provide you with solid statistics of past work they have done. You can also check on the Internet to see if any complaints have been filed against the company. When speaking with a representative from a SEO company, ask them what exactly they do to optimize websites. If they mention anything about automated programs or link farms, this will give you a good indication that they practice black hat SEO. Not many firms will admit this up front, but by paying attention to the words they use, you can get a good idea whether or not the company is ethical.

Last, when shopping for a SEO company, you should get price quotes from several different companies. Ones which offer really cheap quotes in comparison to the other companies may be trying to sell a scam. SEO can be time consuming and a long process depending on the website. No one is going to do all that work for next to nothing.

First, to have a properly optimized website it does not have to look the prettiest. You can have a properly optimized site without paying a boat load of money to have your website redesigned. There are plenty of high ranking websites out there that do not look glamorous by any means. You do want to make sure that your website’s design contains proper code that can easily be seen and read by the search engines.

You also have to look at your website from the user’s perspective as well. If you walked into a physical store and found it to be unorganized, unattractive or dirty, would you stay and shop or walk back out the door? Most Internet users will not spend quality time on a website which is not visibly appealing to them. Whether you are offering products, services or just your thoughts and opinions, if the design is not appealing, users may close the site before they even have a chance to see what the site is all about.

Since one of the factors that search engines look at when ranking your website is popularity and traffic, the look of your website can have a lot to do with how popular your website becomes. Going back to the example of a physical store, if it is not appealing to the eye, people will let other people know. The same goes with users who are looking for new websites to frequent.

If your website’s design is messy, unorganized or not appealing to the user, than it may be time to seriously consider a redesign. Normally a complete redesign is not necessary though. It can be as simple as changing the colors, reorganizing the content so it can be more easily found by the users or changing images and graphics which are being used. You want to look for things that will draw a user in and keep them on your website for a reasonable amount of time.

One design flaw can be fixed easily with minimal cost. If you have more than one design flaw, a whole redesign may be necessary. As I mentioned before, a good ranking website does not have the best the best looking, but a poorly designed website is seldom the most used either. Make sure that the code behind your design is solid and proper first. After that, explore how appealing your website looks to users. By looking at these two items, you can decide if a redesign is something that should be done to help your website.

You need to make sure that the keywords which are being used in the title tags of your website and your website’s content is relevant to what your website is about or the services it offers. Too many times, websites display well written content but have no keywords or keyword phrases.

Say for example that your website is about flower delivery services your flower business offers to the local community. What if you never mention the locality name that you deliver to in your content? Search engines are then going to compare your website to other websites with the words “flower delivery” but it will not know anything about your service area. When users search for flower delivery in the local area that you offer, they are never going to be able to find your website. But if you use “flower delivery to your town”, that’s a different story.

Another consideration with keywords is standing out in the market your business is based in. Using the flower example again, you do not want your only keyword to be “flowers”. Why not? Think of how many other websites use that keyword. If you base your keywords on simple every day terms, you are going to be competing with hundreds if not thousands of other websites which do the same.

So how do you find the best keywords for your business? First, you need to make sure the keywords and keyword terms go in line with what your business is about. Next, you can use an online keyword generator to find good keyword terms for your website. Do a simple Internet search for “keyword generator” and you will be shown several different programs which can help you out.

When using a keyword generator, the program will ask you what your website is about and it will generate keywords based on the information you provide. Good programs will also tell you how many clicks you can expect by using a certain keyword or keyword phrase based on current Internet data and trends. This can keep you away from using keywords or keyword phrases that users are not likely to search for.

As with any industry out there, there are ethical and unethical ways to optimize your website and make it search engine friendly. Unethical SEO hinges on a website having unfair advantages over other websites by being optimized in ways that are not highly regarded in the industry.
Some of the unethical tactics which are used include; cloaking, using the keywords too many times on the website, doorway pages, spelling keywords incorrectly on purpose and spamming the search engines submission process.

Looking at keywords for an example, how could using keywords be unethical? Using keywords in a proper manner are not unethical and matter of fact, they are vital to the success of your website. However, if you use keywords too many times on your website, the search engines view this as a desperate attempt to gain search engine rankings. If you have ever visited a website where the text just read as the same word over and over again, you know what I mean.

Why would I mention spelling keywords incorrectly on purpose? Those who use unethical SEO may have text on their website which resembles popular brand names of items or misspelled names of other businesses. For example, they may have the brand “Samsung Television” misspelled as “Samsun Television”. This is done in hopes that when a user is searching for the term spelled correctly, the website with the misspelled word may show up near the top of the results. Or it is done in hopes that the user will misspell the term when they search for it.

Unethical SEO tactics will hurt your website. Most search engines are smart enough to realize when a website is using unethical SEO tactics and it will either penalize the site or ban it all together. Search engines view unethical SEO as spam and they do not put up with it.

First, let’s look at relevance. Search engines like content which is relevant to your own website and other websites in the same market. If your website focuses on landscaping but you have an article on rock music stuffed in there somewhere, the search engines are not going to value this article as important nor consider it relevant. The more relevant your content is to your website’s focus and keywords, the higher it is going to rank in the search engines.

Ah yes, I mentioned that popular word “keywords”. In order to understand how content helps your SEO, you need to understand what keywords are all about. Keywords are simply the words that Internet users search for when they are looking for products, services or information. For example, if you need to find children’s clothing, you type “children’s clothing” into the search box on your search engine. The content on your website needs to contain keywords that users typically search for. Without the use of good keywords, users are not likely to find your website when searching.

In reference to keywords, it would look pretty odd if your website contained the words “children’s clothing” over and over again. Due to this, you need to know how to properly include keywords in your website content and at the proper saturation level. The point of optimized website content is to have the writing flow so that it looks natural to the reader, all while being search engine friendly.

When it comes down to it, search engines look for content which is relevant and important. By having content which is the proper length (between 300-500 words), strong keywords, proper keyword saturation and well written, you are upping your chances that the search engines will view the content as important and relevant. If your content does not make sense and doesn’t contain strong keywords, the search engines may never pick up on it.

From a user perspective, if the URL’s have keywords in them, it just looks cleaner. If your URL is quite long and are made up of a bunch of words and symbols that are not relevant to what the user is seeing or reading, it can look messy and out of place. When you are thinking about clean web page design that is user friendly, it is not a bad idea to have the URLs be just as clean and user friendly as the rest of the website.

In regards to the search engines, they can use algorithms which can break apart URL’s and find keywords. A search engine is going to break apart the website to try and figure out what the website is about. If the keywords which are contained in the content of the website are also used in the website’s URL, the search engine may get a better idea of what the website is about.

Those are the two main reasons why changing your URLs so that they contain keywords is recommended. With this in mind though, is it really necessary? If you are going through a website redesign, it would not be a bad idea at this point. It is the easiest to change the URLs when a website is being designed or redesigned.

They should also be changed to contain keywords if the URLs are unattractive or do not make any sense in reference to your website’s content. For example, if your website is about flowers but your URL contains the words “my-favorite-page”, this confuses the user and the search engines.

While it is not required, it can help your search engine rankings by making it easier for the search engine crawlers to understand what your website is about. Containing keywords in your URLs is also more appealing to Internet users.

Website tracking is the act of monitoring your websites and tracking changes to the website over a period of time. Simple website tracking can mean monitoring the website’s traffic and popularity over time. You can also track the changes which are made to the website (website design, content changes and updates) which are made to your website to see if the changes increase traffic, search engine ranking and popularity.

Website measuring can include the act of measuring any aspect of your website. It can include measuring the number of page views, number of unique users, and the number of people or types of users which buy from your website or contact you about your services and so on. You can also measure these items against other websites and website trends.

Website analysis includes the process of analyzing the data which was brought to light by the tracking and measuring of your website. The three times are all very closely related. Tracking provides you with the information you need in order to measure and the tracking and measuring provides you with the information to analyze.

The act of site tracking, measuring and analysis itself will not move your website further up in the search engine rankings. It will however provide you with the information that you need in order to make the right decisions.

When you use tracking, measuring and analysis, you can easily see what your website is doing right- and what it is doing wrong. The overall analysis may tell you that your website is performing at its best it ever has been and no changes need to be made. It can also give you a good idea on the areas of your website (the SEO) that you need to improve on.
For example, if you have a website which sells products, you can track the number of hits your website is getting and the average amount of time that users are spending on your website. If you have a lot of visitors but no one is purchasing products and they are not spending a lot of time on your website, you now have the opportunity to analyze why. Without tracking, measuring and analysis, you would be blind to how your website is performing.

All in all, tracking, measuring and analysis are helpful tools that will give you vital information regarding how well your website is or isn’t doing. The tools can give you a good indication on what areas of your website need to be improved upon.

In order to see movement in your page ranking, the first thing that needs to happen is that Google needs to re-index the website. Google has to re-index first so that it can pick up on the changes which were made to the website so that it can properly be positioned in the results. Since this is the first step in achieving a higher ranking in Google, one must wonder how long it takes Google to re-index website pages after SEO is performed.

In order to help with this answer, it is helpful if you know how often Google’s crawlers visited your website prior to the SEO taking place. Until Google recognizes the changes which were made to optimize your website, it will most likely scan your website on the same schedule. The only way to get re-indexed in Google is to have their crawlers visit your website again and scan the new information.

But wait, aren’t there other ways for Google’s crawler to enter my website aside from its normal visit? What I mentioned above is the normal scenario given that your website was not properly optimized! Since your website is now properly optimized, you now have inbound links to your website. Google can use these inbound links to enter your website and re-index your website. So now we are looking at how many times Google’s crawler visits the website which now links to your site.

In all honesty, there is no way to know how many times the website with an inbound link is visited, but here is some general information. Highly ranked websites in Google can be visited by the crawler several times a week. Middle of the road websites are normally visited a couple times a week and lower ranked websites are usually visited once or twice a month.
Generally it can take a day or two to a few weeks for Google to re-index your website. Unfortunately, SEO professionals have no control over how often a search engine crawler visits your website. Since you now have proper optimization though, the chances of the crawler visiting more frequently are going to increase.

The writing on your website can sometimes make you feel like you are in a catch 22. The SEO experts tell you that the writing needs to be search engine friendly, but you also want content that will be easily read and understood by your users. If the writing on your website looks foreign to people then no one will visit your website right? While users may visit your website, no one will hang around long if the content looks out of order. If you change the writing on your website and aim it at being only search engine friendly, it can also make the writing look out of place to the users.

Your website needs to have a balance between quality writing that users will understand and search engine friendly writing. How do you achieve this balance? First, do not be over zealous with how many times you use your website’s keywords in the writing. Over use of the keywords will make the user question just what exactly they are reading and it can also have an opposite effect in the search engine rankings. Your keywords should never be included in the writing more than three to five percent of the total content or article. Anymore than that, the search engines may believe it is spam and it will also read funny to your users.

Of course part of SEO is the content on your website. Due to this, you do need to have solid writing that the search engines will value as important and relevant to your website and to the market that your website is in. As mentioned, you need to have good keywords, proper keyword phrases and know how to use them within the writing.

When it comes down to the bottom line, you do not just need to write for the search engines, but you do need to have a good balance in your website’s writing. The writing needs to appeal to users so that they will continue to visit your website. It also needs to be search engine friendly so that the search engines will pick up on it.

SEO includes natural methods of making a website search engine friendly. Changes are made to the website itself for the purpose of trying to make search engines recognize the website as important and popular. Every search engine uses algorithms (mathematical processes), to determine how popular and important a website is. The search engine then uses these algorithms to determine where a website shows up in the search engine results when specific keyword terms are searched by users.

When a website is search engine optimized, the focus is placed on quality keywords, quality content, proper html code and inbound links to name a few. These are things which can naturally be changed to give a website a leg up in the search engine results.

Regarding SEM, some will argue that it includes all aspects of search engine marketing (including SEO), while others argue that SEM deals more with pay per click (PPC) and paid online advertising. When it comes down to it, any form of online website marketing can be deemed SEM. SEM includes the use of SEO and other marketing methods such as paid advertisements and pay per click ads.

The main difference is that SEO just covers the natural methods of making a website search engine friendly while SEM covers a broad spectrum of online website marketing. Some websites only use SEO to gain an advantage in the search engines, while other websites take advantage of the other online marketing resources which are available to them.

One of the reasons why website owners may use other SEM tactics aside from SEO is due to the fact that natural SEO takes time. Even a properly optimized website will not display as the number one website in search engine results right away. It takes time for natural methods to move the website higher up in the search engine results. If a website owner wants to see traffic results right away, they may opt to use PPC or online advertising methods to make their website visible.

When using these other methods of online advertising, a website owner pays a fee to search engines for displaying their website information where users can easily find it. Most often times, these ads will display at the very top of search engine results or on the sidebar. The advertising fee is only charged when a user clicks on the ad (PPC or pay per click). These ads may also appear on other websites that has content which is relevant to the advertising website’s content.

There is also straight advertising on someone else’s website. This often includes having banner or graphic ads displayed on a website with the purpose of promoting your website. The advertising cost is paid to the website owner or company directly. Some websites also offer pay per click advertising like the search engines as well.
There are several ways a website can be marketed online. SEM covers all of these methods, while SEO only covers the natural methods and changes which are made to a website to make it search engine friendly.

A link farm is essentially a large group of websites which all link back to each other. Most link farms are created not by humans, but by automatic programs. In most instances, link farms are considered spam by the search engines. The thought process behind link farms is that if you have dozens or hundreds of websites that link to yours, the better chances your website has to have high search engine visibility.

At first, link farms were thought to be harmless and they probably were. Many link farms that were created years ago were created by people, not by programs. Now days, the use of link farms to gain search engine results has become so automated and so out of control that the search engines will penalize or even ban sites which they consider to be link farms. Major search engines such as Google suggest that website owners request incoming links from other website owners rather than participate in link farms.

Link exchanges are different from link farms and the two should not be confused. Websites which belong to link exchanges do so to target a specific user or customer. Other websites which participate in the exchange offer the same type of products or services as the rest in most instances.

With link exchanges, a website owner joins a “ring” of other websites. In order to join this group of other websites, the exchange site usually requires the website owner to retrieve website code which will display in banner form on their website. These banners usually link to the link exchange site itself or to other websites that participate in the link exchange.

While link exchanges are not normally considered spam by the search engines like link farms, there are still some disadvantages to using them. Most of the time, you will not have control over what banner displays on your website. It is very important to have control over banner ads on your website so that users of your site will not be offended or confused by the banners. You may also get stuck using banners which have large file sizes that will slow down your website.

To sum it up, link farms are not highly regarded when it comes to good SEO. These days, link farms are considered to be an unethical SEO tactic which is used to generate quick website traffic and search engine rankings. Even though link exchanges are not as harmful to your website as participating in a link farm, it is an option that most website owners are staying clear from these days due to other solid SEO options which provide better results.

I am talking about text links on websites. Text links, (also known as hyperlinks) can be found on millions of websites. Simply, a text link is a portion of the text on a website that links to another part of the same website or a different website all together. Sometimes they can be obvious by displaying the words “click here” in the text, and other times you may never know you are looking at a text link.

Why are text links used? At one time or another, someone realized that a website full of long links to other websites or other pages on the website looked messy. Aside from the clutter that links impose on a website, users do not typically pay attention to links on sidebar menus. If a user is reading an article, they are paying attention to what they are reading and not what is contained in the surrounding space on the website.

There needs to be a good way to display links on websites to relevant and important information that do not take away from the look of the website. Text links satisfy this need. Instead of seeing a long, underlined link with several characters in the middle of an article, you just see a set of words which are different in font or color than the rest of the text. Or as mentioned above, text links can be in the form of an instruction to the user, telling them to click a certain word or set of words to get more information.

Let’s look at an example. “Jane Doe has also commented on the use of artificial flowers in her article The Many Ways to Use Artificial Flowers.” Here, I have italicized the name “Jane Doe” and the name of the article that Jane Doe wrote. When a user clicks on “Jane Doe” or the name of the article, they are then taken to the article which was referenced.

Text links are used to keep the flow of the article going without a major interruption or distraction. They are a good way for a website owner to link to other pages within their own website or to other websites in which they want to reference.

Did you know however, that some of the biggest companies in the world use SEO? Just because your company has a strong brand name, does not mean that users will specifically search for your website when they need products or services. Your company could be the largest designer purse company in the world. If someone however searches for the term “designer purses” in their search engine, will your website show up?

This is exactly why SEO is needed even if you have a strong brand name. Users seldom search for brand names when they are trying to find products or services on the Internet. Most users search for keywords or keyword phrases which are associated with the products or services that they are searching for.

Of course keywords are not the only aspect of SEO. What if a user is on another website looking for products or services, but they do not find what they are looking for? If your website has what they are looking for and there is a link to your website on the site they are currently viewing, you now have an instant customer.

Are you sure that there are no errors in your website’s html code? If there are, the errors may be preventing your website from being indexed in the search engines or from being listed high up in the rankings. SEO professionals know what to look for in your website’s code. They find and fix errors which may be preventing your website from performing its best.

When thinking about your company’s brand name and SEO, consider television commercials. If companies could rely on brand names alone, no one would advertise on television or in print ads. You need to look at your website in the same sort of manner. SEO is marketing and proper SEO can help your website move to the top of the search engine results.

When you are thinking about word count, it is highly important to think about quality over quantity. Quality is necessary from a user’s perspective and also from the search engine’s perspective. If you have a lot of information to share, do you really want to cut out the majority of the information? Won’t your users feel cheated if they only received half of the information due to it being shortened?

From a search engine’s point of view, the engine wants to know what your website is about so they can properly index it and rank it. The number of words you should have on your web pages should be long enough so that the search engine can detect what your website is about. It should also be short enough to not be filled with fluff words or words that are not relevant.

Search engines look for quality content with good keywords and proper keyword saturation. They are looking for web pages which are important and relevant. If you can write two hundred words which contain the keywords for the web page in the proper density, why would you want to write more? Or if you have an article which is one thousand words long but only part of it contains relevant information, cutting out the filler words is not a bad idea.

While there are no set amount of words that you should or should not use, most will agree that the average amount of words per page should be around five hundred. Remember however, that more or less words will not put your website in jeopardy if the content is of high quality. There is a better chance of losing search engine rank if you have poor quality content than there is the chance that you will lose it over too many or too few words.

When you submit a website to a search engine, it will not automatically appear. The search engine needs time to recognize that your website even exists. One of the reasons behind the lag is that the search engines use what’s called a crawler that scans the content of your website. Once your website is submitted to a search engine, it can take days or weeks for the crawler to visit your website and perform its scan.

A downside to these crawlers is that they sometimes have issues seeing the website. Website owners and designers sometimes focus more on the look of the website over the content. Eye pleasing flash and JavaScript can sometimes block the crawler or bot from being able to recognize the content of your website.

You also might not be able to see your website listed in the search engine because it is not listed within the first few pages. Each internet search engine has thousands, if not millions of websites relating to certain subject matters. If your website it about candles and you type in the keyword “candle,” the search engine is going to return page after page of website results.

Search engines tend to trust older websites over newer websites. They do this, because websites are built and then forgot about by their owners at times. The longer the website has been around, the higher up the website it going to be in the search engine listings.

Your website may also be unseen because of content issues (or lack of content). The content on your website has to be highly related to keywords that are being searched for. Going back to the candle website example; you are selling scented candles which are based on the smells of nature. If an internet user is searching for “nature scented candles”; the search engine is going to bring up websites which contain those keywords in the content first. If the words “nature”, “scented” and “candles” are not listed on your website or listed without the correct keyword density, your website is not going to show high up in the search engine results.

When a website is completed, one of the things that seems to fall under the table, is the number of good incoming and outgoing links. As mentioned, internet search engines value websites which are trusted. Another way for the search engines to think that a website is trusted, is if they are linked to other websites which have existed a long time, have good content and is ranked high in the search engines.

Simply placing a link to another high ranked website on one of your pages is not going to do the trick however. You need not only provide a link to other trusted websites, but those websites need to provide links to your site (reciprocal link). You also need to be very careful which websites you link to. Linking to websites which have low page ranks in the search engines can actually do more harm than good.

While these are just a few of the different reasons why your website is not appearing in the search engines that you submitted your site to, it is a good starting point to research the issue.

If you do PPC, you are already aware that it is an online advertising method which you pay for. Search engines offer website owners the option of paying for ads to be displayed in the search engine results. Your ad shows up when a user searches for the keyword terms which are relevant to your advertisement. You decide how much you are willing to pay per click and your account only gets charged when someone clicks on the ad which is displayed. The more money you are willing to pay, the more your advertisement shows up in the results. How much you are willing to pay per click also affects where the ad shows up in the results. Some of the most popular pay per click systems are Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter.

While PPC is useful if you want to get your website recognized by users right away, it can get awfully expensive and it is not the only thing you can do to market your website. If you are trying to get your website listed high up in the search engines, your ultimate goal should be to have this happen without the use of paid advertisements. PPC advertising should be used in conjunction with SEO and not as the only marketing method for your website.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of making your website search engine friendly naturally. Every search engine has a set of algorithms (mathematical processes), which determine where a website should be listed in the search engine results. Most of these algorithms help a search engine determine how important and how popular websites are.

Natural changes can be made to your website to achieve higher search engine listings. Some of these changes include; improving the content of your website, improving the keywords, obtaining inbound links to your website and fixing any html coding errors.

While having your website search engine optimized does cost money if you pay a professional to perform the optimization, this cost is only a small fraction of what you would pay over the course of your website’s lifetime to only use PPC advertising.

Search engine optimization uses processes (also known as algorithms) which make a website search engine friendly. It is the driving force behind the volume of hits (clicks) that your website receives. This process can include one or more of the following:

* Restructuring your website content to ensure it matches up with certain keyword terms that Internet users are searching for. This can be done for written content on the website, image content and media content.

* Making sure all inbound and outbound links on your website are working properly.

* Making sure that links provided on your website are relevant to your website’s content.

* Factoring in what Internet users are searching for and what search engines consider important.

* Finding the best keywords to use that will give your website the power to move up within the search engine rankings.

* Removing items which may be hindering the search engines from properly listing your website in its index.

* Properly using Meta tags in the headings and footers of your website.

* Fixing any errors in your websites html code.

* Making the search engines believe that your website is a trusted source.

SEO is based on the technical end of website marketing. Will it make your website show up number one in the search engine results the very next day? No, but it does give your website a leading edge over other websites which do not contain proper SEO. Once the search engines scan your website and it is properly optimized, you will see a noticeable difference and your website’s search engine placement start to climb.

The better optimized your website is, the more search engines will start to trust its content. Trusted and quality content is one of the main things that search engines look for in a good website. SEO is one of the best tactics a website owner can use to develop trust between the search engines and their website.

As with any industry out there, there are ethical and unethical ways to optimize your website and make it search engine friendly. Unethical SEO hinges on a website having unfair advantages over other websites by being optimized in ways that are not highly regarded in the industry.
Some of the unethical tactics which are used include; cloaking, using the keywords too many times on the website, doorway pages, spelling keywords incorrectly on purpose and spamming the search engines submission process.

Looking at keywords for an example, how could using keywords be unethical? Using keywords in a proper manner are not unethical and matter of fact, they are vital to the success of your website. However, if you use keywords too many times on your website, the search engines view this as a desperate attempt to gain search engine rankings. If you have ever visited a website where the text just read as the same word over and over again, you know what I mean.

Why would I mention spelling keywords incorrectly on purpose? Those who use unethical SEO may have text on their website which resembles popular brand names of items or misspelled names of other businesses. For example, they may have the brand

Why would a person want to use hidden text on their website? The first reason (which is not the common reason), is to hide text from users that may not understand the text or want to see it. The next reason (and the most common) is so that keyword terms or phrases can be injected in the website without users being able to view it.

The thought process behind hidden text is that the search engines will pick up on the keyword terms or phrases which are used in the hidden text. This will in turn possibly give the website the advantage of being listed higher up in the search engine results due to the fact that they keywords are used so many times.

Should you use this tactic to achieve a better search engine ranking? No, you should not use it and matter of fact it may actually get your website banned from the search engines. Search engines have become highly intelligent in recognizing hidden text.

For example, when Google’s crawlers scan a website, it dissects the color of the text when it is being analyzed. This results in the crawler being able to recognize the hidden text. Now, you would think that this is what you wanted being that since the crawler can see the text, it will pick up on the keywords and the purpose is achieved.

Search engines today view hidden text as a good way to spam the search engines. Before this practice was looked down upon and caught, websites were showing up in search results where they didn’t belong due to the hidden text. Internet users were becoming frustrated because if they searched for a term, the engine may display websites that have nothing to do with the search term (because the term was in the hidden text).

Using hidden text is a sure fire way to get your website pushed so far down in the search engines that very few users will ever get to see it. This is true even the hidden text was being used with good intentions and not with the intention to spam. Some search engines will ban your website from its index all together if hidden text is found by a crawler. Getting banned is the last thing you want to happen to your website as then it will not be listed in the search engine results at all. If you want to achieve high search engine rankings, hidden text will more than likely give you the opposite result of what you wanted.

You need to make sure that the keywords which are being used in the title tags of your website and your website’s content is relevant to what your website is about or the services it offers. Too many times, websites display well written content but have no keywords or keyword phrases.

Say for example that your website is about flower delivery services your flower business offers to the local community. What if you never mention the locality name that you deliver to in your content? Search engines are then going to compare your website to other websites with the words “flower delivery” but it will not know anything about your service area. When users search for flower delivery in the local area that you offer, they are never going to be able to find your website. But if you use “flower delivery to your town”, that’s a different story.

Another consideration with keywords is standing out in the market your business is based in. Using the flower example again, you do not want your only keyword to be “flowers”. Why not? Think of how many other websites use that keyword. If you base your keywords on simple every day terms, you are going to be competing with hundreds if not thousands of other websites which do the same.

So how do you find the best keywords for your business? First, you need to make sure the keywords and keyword terms go in line with what your business is about. Next, you can use an online keyword generator to find good keyword terms for your website. Do a simple Internet search for “keyword generator” and you will be shown several different programs which can help you out.

When using a keyword generator, the program will ask you what your website is about and it will generate keywords based on the information you provide. Good programs will also tell you how many clicks you can expect by using a certain keyword or keyword phrase based on current Internet data and trends. This can keep you away from using keywords or keyword phrases that users are not likely to search for.

Cross linking is when you link websites that you own together. Why would you want to link websites that you own together? Simply, it is an easy way for you to market your other websites on the website a user is viewing. Let’s view an example.

You have a website where you sell exquisite chocolate items from all around the world. Recently, you started a chocolate making company of your own and you link the two websites together. This would make sense because both websites have to do with chocolate. The search engines are going to recognize the related content and importance of both of these websites.

Now let’s say that you have your exquisite chocolate website and you also publish a website based on Finance. Would it make sense to cross link these two websites? To you, it probably would make sense as you are trying to get people who visit your chocolate website to visit your new website. To search engines however, it does not make sense. The content is not related and they know that finance and chocolate are not important to each other.

Too many times, those who own websites link all of their websites together. They may have their e-commerce site, their blog, their family photo website and their travel adventure website all linked together. Doing this can actually hurt your website’s ranking. Spammers also use cross linking to link together dozens or hundreds of websites together.

Cross linking is useful if it makes sense and it is not overdone. You want to make sure that the websites being linked together are relevant in content. Search engines will not regard cross linking between websites that have nothing to do with each other or when it is done in excess.

The actual factors that go into Google’s PageRankTM are actually quite simple. Even though Google has over 100 different factors that determine page rank, there is only one which determines PageRankTM. In order to understand this, we need to understand the difference between a website’s page rank and PageRankTM. Page rank uses all of the algorithms and criteria to calculate how important a website is based on its content and other factors. PageRankTM is Google’s way of determining a website’s importance and popularity based on the number of inbound (incoming) links the website has.

The algorithm Google uses, looks at the number incoming links to a website and then compares it against other websites in the Google index. Google rates a website on a scale of 0 to 10 in their PageRankTM system. The higher the number, the better PageRankTM a website has. The higher the PageRankTM is, the more popular that website is deemed by Google and as I mentioned, this popularity is based off of the number of incoming links the website has. It is also based off of the quality of incoming links.

When it comes down to it, how much does Google PageRankTM affect your overall rankings in Google? Remember what I mentioned above- Google’s PageRankTM is only one out of a hundred or so algorithms Google uses in determining a website’s importance. If you have a low PageRankTM, it is not the end of the world and it does not mean that your site will be buried in Google.

Other factors on your website such as quality content, keywords and traffic also affect your overall page rank on Google. Now if you have bad content, your website is not receiving much traffic and your PageRankTM is low or non-existent, your search engine ranking in Google is not going to be that great. You can however have a popular website which shows up high in the search engine results without having a high PageRankTM. PageRankTM is only part of the equation, not the only equation that matters.

Inbound links, also known as incoming links are very important in website optimization. Inbound links are also quite important in obtaining search engine traffic. Before search engines existed, the only way to travel from website to website was to bounce from website to website through links. Even though search engines exist now, providing an easy way to find websites, inbound links are still very important.

When you have a new website or one which does not have a lot of traffic yet, inbound links can provide an easy way for people to find your website without having to search through page after page in the search engine results. If another website links to you, and that site has a high volume of traffic, some of that traffic count is going to trickle down to your website. Users are always curious and always want to find new websites which are informational or useful to them. If they trust the website they are visiting or visit it often, they are going to be more apt to trust the links which are provided on that website.

Concerning SEO, inbound links are one of the most important factors in pushing your website to the top of search engine results. Search engines like websites which have been around a long time and those which are trusted. If a trusted website provides a link to another website, that other website is going to be considered more trusted by the search engines than it would be without those inbound links. If the website which provides an inbound link to your site is popular, the search engine will also give your website a bit of weight on the popularity side as well.

If you have a new website or one that has not been indexed yet, inbound links also provide a simple and easy way for the search engines to find your website an index it. Indexing is the first step which needs to happen before your website shows up in the search engine results. A popular website on the internet is going to have the search engine crawlers visit their sites more often. When the crawler visits the site, it has the ability to enter into other websites through the links.

No matter which way you look at it, aside from quality content and keywords, inbound links are the next most important thing a website needs in order to gain popularity and be ranked higher by the search engines.

In order to show up in the search engines, your site needs to be indexed by the search engine. In order to be indexed, the search engine’s crawler, spider or robot will scan the website and download its content and information. It is important to remember though, that even the most precise and fast crawlers cannot scan every single page on the Internet. This is why when you have a new website it can take a good deal of time for your site to be indexed by the search engines.

When a spider or crawler scans your website, it stores the fact that your website exists on the Internet and where your website can be reached. It scans your content, your images and the media on your website to determine where your website should belong in the search engine as well.

If you know even a little about SEO, you have probably heard time and time again that incoming links to your website from other websites are important. Incoming links are also important when it comes to the search engine crawlers scanning your website. As I mentioned, it would be impossible for one automated program to scan every single website available. When a crawler scans a website, it also scans the links which are contained on that website and enters them. If another website is being crawled and that site has a link to your website then your website has now been found by the search engine. This is vital when you have a new website which has not been indexed yet. The more incoming links you have to your website, the better chance you have of a search engine crawler finding your content and pages.

In a perfect world, every crawler, spider or robot would be good and not cause any harm or malice on the Internet. Search engine crawlers are indeed harmless and you want them scanning your website if you desire your website to be listed in the search engine results. It isn’t a perfect world though and all crawlers, spiders and robots aren’t always good.

If you ever wondered where a good majority of email spam comes from, you can blame website crawlers, spiders and robots. These types of crawlers are not used by the search engines- they are used to quickly collect and obtain hundreds to thousands of email addresses to spam. They scan websites looking for email addresses which are contained in the text of your code.

If you see a crawler, spider or robot visiting your website, nine times out of ten it is just a search engine crawler and it means no harm. However, if you are unsure if it means more harm than good, you can search for the name of the crawler on the Internet. If you see “Slurp” for example on your website, it is a crawler used by the Yahoo search engine. When it comes down to it, you want the search engine crawlers there as they will get the information which is needed in order for your website to show up in the search engine results.

The first method is to do a simple search. Yes, it is actually this simple! When you are on the Internet, go to your search engine that you use. In the search box, type the word “link:” and use a colon after it. Without placing a space between the colon and your website address, type in the website address. Once the search is complete, you will be looking at inbound links to your website and the websites that link to you. If nothing displays, it means that the search engine cannot find any inbound links to your website.

The second method is to use Google Analytics. Google Analytics can tell you how many inbound links that your website has. It can also tell you how much traffic your website has, where (geographically) the traffic comes from, how the person entered your website and a ton more! Not only will Google Analytics tell you how many inbound links your website has, it will also tell you the website domain your link is listed on.

If you use WordPress as the backend of your website or blog, WordPress will tell you if you have any incoming links and where they come from. WordPress displays this information right in the dashboard section.

If you prefer not to use Google Analytics and you do not use WordPress as your website’s backend, the other option is to use programs which will find how many incoming links your website has. Keep in mind though that most of these programs will only tell you how many you have- not the website addresses in which they come from.

You can find programs which will tell you how many inbound links your website has by doing a simple search on “how do I find websites that link to mine,” or other related terms. One of these programs can be found at www.marketleap.com. This website will tell you the number of inbound links you have coming to your website. It also compares your website with other websites which also have inbound links. This can be a great tool in helping you determine whether or not the number of inbound links that you site has is a sufficient enough amount.

In order to completely understand dynamic pages before we get into whether or not they will harm your rankings, let’s look at a couple of examples of dynamic web pages. Real Estate websites often use dynamic pages as it makes it easier for them to update the listings on their website. Banks and financial institutions also frequently use dynamic pages if they have an online banking system. A customer’s account information and balance is constantly changing. Using dynamic pages allows a customer’s balance to be instantly updated every time there is a change to their account.

Static pages are more easily indexed by the search engines. However, it is becoming impossible to strictly use static pages, especially if your website has a large database that is constantly being updated. This becomes a problem for website owners as search engine crawlers can sometimes have a difficult time indexing dynamic pages.

Why do the crawlers have a hard time indexing dynamic pages? The simple answer is that crawlers, robots and spiders cannot see them until a user of the website activates the variable that is used to generate the content. Some crawlers will actually ignore dynamic pages all together because it does not have the ability to dig deep enough into the database to retrieve the information.

Does all of this mean that your ranking will be sent down hill if you use dynamic pages? If your dynamic pages are not optimized, then yes your website’s ranking can be affected negatively. The good news is, SEO professionals have learned tricks and techniques that can enable dynamic pages to be found and indexed by search engines. While dynamic pages are by far more difficult to optimize than static pages in order to be indexed by the search engines, it is not impossible.

Doorway and gateway pages are designed around a few sets of keywords and stand by themselves away from the rest of the website. A doorway or gateway page which is designed correctly will look no differently from any other website. When you click on the links on a doorway or gateway page, you will then be directed to another website.

At some point, you have surely stumbled upon one of these doorway or gateway pages when searching the Internet. You can usually tell by the same words or phrases being repeated in the content several times or by the phrase; “for more information, please click here”. When you go to the linked website which is provided, the new website you visit will usually have the same look and feel of the doorway page that you just visited. This makes the user feel as though they can trust the content of the new website that pops up due to the familiar face that the new site presents.

So far it sounds pretty harmless though. Doorway and gateway pages would probably be relatively harmless if it was not for the fact that there are usually several doorway and gateway pages that lead to the same website. This is why they are now considered spam by the major search engines.
Doorway and gateway pages can also use a form of spam called “cloaking”. Cloaking is when the internet user sees one version of the website but the search engine crawlers see another version.

The use of doorway and gateway pages came about as an easy way to improve the volume of traffic to a website and move the website higher up in the search engine rankings. These days, search engines regard doorway and gateway pages as spam and are not given any credit. If the search engine crawlers notice that you have a gateway or doorway page to your website (and they will), it can push your website down so deep into the results that no one will ever be able to find it. Using doorway or gateway pages is also a way to get your website banned from the search engine results all together.

The first thing to consider is your website’s market. If your website is about online flower delivery, you have several websites which have been in business for many years that you will be competing with. In the land of search engine results, it is all about age, trust and reliability. Sounds like a relationship doesn’t it? In essence, it is a relationship- one between your website and the search engines. Now let’s look at a market which is not as flooded as online flower ordering and delivery. Your website is about collecting and selling vintage hair clips and barrettes.

Here, we find a smaller market which has not been taken over by large companies or companies which have been in business on the web a great deal of time. The smaller the market your website is in, the better chance you have of obtaining a high ranking in a faster amount of time. If you are placing your website into a pile of other sites which have been in business for years and have already gained search engine trust, it is going to take longer to see your desired results.

Another factor to consider is how often your website gets scanned by search engine crawlers, spiders and robots. These automated programs scan websites for content, updates and information. If your website is well known with a good amount of incoming links from other websites, the optimization updates which were made to your website may be recognized by the search engines in a short amount of time. However, if your website is unknown, has little traffic or is linked from other websites which have low rankings, it could take a long time for your website to be scanned and updated within the search engine results. Of course if your website is properly optimized, it will have good incoming links for crawlers to enter through.

How long it will take to gain good search engine rankings essentially depends on the market your website is in and when it gets scanned by search engines crawlers who will then recognize the optimization which was made. While there is no solid answer to the question, the time period can be as little as a few days or as long as months before you start seeing the results you desire. It is very important with optimization to have realistic goals. Having your website optimized yesterday will not make it the number one website the next day, but it will give it a better shot of being number one in the future.

First let’s look at file names. When you save a file to your hard drive on your computer, it often contains spaces between the words. Spaces between words however, are not universal between naming a file to save to your computer and naming a website file. Search engine crawlers do not recognize spaces between words. When a crawler is scanning your website and it finds spaces between file names, it honestly does not know what to do with it. If your file name has more than one word in it, the best way to name the file is with dashes between the spaces of the words.

Next, think about the names of your files. The actual words within the file name can have a negative effect in two different areas. If you have a 3 page website, it may be tempting to name them; page1, page2 and page3. But when a user sees your website, how will they know what is contained on page1, page2 and page3? Search engines will also have a hard time associating these named files with the content of your website. It is best to use descriptive or keyword terms within the file names. If your website is about accounting services, it would be more beneficial for your file names to look like this:

www.xyzaccounting.com/accounting-services.html
www.xyzaccounting.com/about-us.html
www.xyzaccounting.com/customer-testimonials.com

It is important to recognize that this information is going to show up in the address bar on the web browser which is being used. File names are different from title tags which typically show up in the upper left hand corner of the web browser. If your files contain keywords, search engines will have an easier time matching up the file name to the content contained on the website.

Now to directory structure and the rules to follow. Important information contained within your website should be contained within directories which are easily found. The important pages should not be buried deep within your website’s directory. To accomplish this, it is best to have all of your web pages contained within the website’s root directory. Search engines will give priority to directory files which are found in the root directory over those which are not. Like file names, it is also important to have keywords contained within the directory names. You should also keep your directory as simple and organized as possible so the information can be found easily by the search engines.

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two websites. The purpose of reciprocal linking is to drive up traffic volume of both of the websites. If a user is visiting website A and clicks a link to website B, website B has received traffic from website A and vice versa.

Reciprocal linking is often the term used for linking three websites together as well. Website A links to B and C and B and C link to A. Regardless of the number of website involved, the sole purpose is to create traffic on the three websites.

Why is reciprocal linking so important in website optimization? The obvious reason is due to the fact that it gives a website a better chance of users visiting the websites which are linked. Every website wants traffic, but every website also wants to be ranked high in the search engines.

Reciprocal links not only drive up traffic, but they can also improve search engine ranking. The more traffic that visits your website, the more the search engine is going to believe that your website is trusted.

When you have a reciprocal link, the website which you are linked to and from may be a higher ranked website than the one you own or manage. For example, if you have a PageRank of 1 on Google, but the reciprocal link has a PageRank of 5, your website is going to benefit.

Reciprocal links are also another good way of getting your website indexed quicker. When another website links to your website (given that your site has not been indexed yet), the search engine crawlers can enter your website through the link provided on the other website. If the search engine crawler visits the other website often, your site gains the advantage of being indexed sooner rather than later.

As I mentioned above, reciprocal linking is for the mutual benefit of both websites. You may be questioning then why an established website with good ranking would want to have a reciprocal link with a low or no ranked website? Normally, they wouldn’t. However, if the low ranked website shows good potential , it would benefit the higher ranked website in the future.

First, you need to make good use of the very thing you are trying to get your website listed on. Search the top search engines for “SEO tools,” “website optimization tools” and “webmaster tools” to name a few. By searching for these keyword phrases, you will be flooded with tons of information to help get you started. Some of the information you will find may include; programs that suggest good keywords, programs that will check your website for proper keyword density and programs which will check the validity and worthiness of your website’s links.

With Google being one of the most used search engines across the world, you may want to check into Google’s Webmaster tools. The Google Webmaster tools can tell you several things about your website that you would otherwise not know. It can tell you which keywords were searched when people visited your website, which pages are indexed by Google, remove pages you do not want listed in Google and see which content is not visible to Google due to incorrect coding or cover ups. Most of the tools that Google has are user friendly and do not take very long to learn to navigate.

When you spend a good deal of time browsing the Internet though, it can become tiring and frustrating. When you decide to handle your own SEO, try changing things up a bit by going to your local bookstore and picking up a book or guide to SEO. If you purchase a book, make sure that it is a recently published edition. Older books may lead you in wrong direction by suggesting things that are no longer practiced or acceptable to the search engines.

If you are a visual learner, attending a local seminar hosted by an SEO company or professional could also be an immense help. There are those that can read about a subject matter and become an expert in no time. Others need to see someone else performing the action before they feel comfortable giving it a go themselves. Several companies offer training for a relatively low cost and they can be found in all major cities across the world. If you live in a remote area and will have difficulty getting to a seminar, many companies offer online training sessions as well.

You will find that there is a ton of information to view, go over and start to digest. There are several different ways to make your website SEO friendly and it seems as though everyone and every company will tell you something different. You may have to experiment a little at first, but in a short time you will find a way that will work for you- and your website.

Cloaking happens when the content that the crawler, spider or robot s sees is different from what a user of the website would see. Cloaking can detect whether the user is a search engine crawler or a regular user based on the IP address.

Cloaking is a tactic which is used in SEO to try and get the website listed higher in the search engine results. The principle behind this method is the same as using hidden text, but cloaking and hidden text are two separate tactics. The only purpose of cloaking is to try to get the search engine spider, robot or crawler to see search engine friendly information, even though that information is not actually displayed to the normal users of the website.

For example, cloaking would want the search engine crawler to see a website which contains more keywords than the user would see when visiting the website. This is done to trick the search engines believe that the website is more relevant to the keyword terms than it really is. One may ask why website developers do not just put up the websites which contain the search engine friendly information that they want the crawlers to see? Simply, this is not done due to the fact that if the user saw the cloaked version of the website, it would not be visually appealing. By cloaking a website, it stays beautiful to the human eye, but it also becomes more search engine friendly.

Cloaking however as mentioned, is not highly regarded by the search engines. If the crawler finds that the website is using cloaking techniques, the website may actually be banned or penalized.

First, you need to make sure that your website is ready for action. By action, I mean it is ready for people to view it and use it. Too many people concentrate so hard on the optimization end of their website that the website itself falls under the table.

Next, you need to get organized. Jumping back and forth between different areas of optimization can hurt your website especially if it is a website which has already been indexed by the search engines. Sit down and look over your website to see what areas need to most optimization first and concentrate on those areas. Make a list from the most important (or areas which are most lacking), to areas which only need a little bit of tweaking. The third step is research. Before you touch your website, you need to be aware of what search engines are looking for in order to properly optimize your website. You can find the basics by doing a simple Internet search, or start with the couple of items listed below.

You need to have good quality content with the proper keywords and keyword density. The text needs to be well written and easy to understand to the readers you are targeting. When I say that keyword density is important, I want you to understand that it is vital. Why? Because search engines are very smart, that’s why. If your website is selling shoes and you have the word “shoe” listed a thousand times on one page of your website, the search engines are going to pick up on this. The search engine is going to read this as desperation and it will drive your website so far down in the search engines that it will take you days to find it again. Proper keyword density is between 3% to 5%. In other words, if you have a web page with an article about roses, your keywords or keyword phrases should be limited to 3 to 5 percent of the total content.

Incoming links should be at the top of your list. Incoming links provide an open door for search engine crawlers, spiders and robots to enter your website and scan its content. They also provide an easy gateway for user traffic to your website. In order to get good incoming links, you need to market your website and its products, services or content to other website owners. Marketing skills can come quite in handy here. You need to have the ability to check your website for any html code errors. Errors may be blocking what the search engines see or showing what you do not want them to see. If you know little or nothing about html code, you may want to have a professional check over the website for these items.

With this information, you should be able your website’s optimization started. You first need to prepare yourself and become knowledgeable of the techniques. After you have the knowledge, you can start applying the techniques to your website.

When considering this question, I want you to remember one word; “relevancy”. From there, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is the content of my website targeting Australian users?

2. Is the website hosted in Australia or in another country?

3. Is your domain name a top level domain relevant to Australia?

4. Do you have inbound links to other websites which target an Australian audience?

5. Where are the users located that frequently visit your website?

Now let’s go over why these questions are important one by one. In reference to your content, if it is aimed towards consumers of the U.S. (products American’s like to buy), information that U.S. users often search for or offers services aimed at American users; this gives you a pretty good idea on why the website is showing up in U.S. search engines and not Australian search engines. Search engines place websites based on content among other factors.

Where your website is hosted is a factor that few ever think about. Most times, hosting companies are chosen on reliability and price. If you are targeting an Australian audience, but your website is hosted in the United States then the search engines will pick up on this and place it where they feel appropriate. If you are targeting Australian search engines but have a .com website name, this could be one of the top issues. Websites that are targeting a certain country should have that country’s internet “code” after the .com. For example, if you own a website which sells shoes, the search engine is not going to know what country it is targeting with just .com at the end of the domain name. It is best to have the country code following .com, such as .com.au (.au for Australia). This will give the search engines a clue that the website is targeting a certain country.

If you are targeting Australian search engines, then it is quite important to form bonds with other relevant websites which are listed high up in the Australian search engines. If your website only has inbound links from websites which are located in the United States, this could be a huge reason why the U.S. search engines are showing your websites while the Australian ones are not.

Who is using your website the most? Australian users or users from the U.S.? When you are trying to get your website into the top search engine results, the volume of traffic your website receives is very important. When you are trying to get your website listed in your country’s search engine results, the volume of traffic still counts, but the location of the users of your website matters just as much. If the visitors of your website are mostly from the U.S., the U.S. search engines believe that the information on your website is the most useful to those users.

As I mentioned above, relevancy is a key term to answering this question. The more relevant your website is to the Australian audience, the better chance you have of your website being listed in Australian search engines.

The bigger question however, is should you? There are several factors you need to take into consideration before you decide if you should handle the SEO for your website.

1. Do you have the skills it would take? For those who work as a computer programmer or SEO professional, it would make sense to save the money and do it yourself. However, not everyone who owns a website is in a computer field. If you do not have the skills which are necessary, you would need to learn them.

2. Do you have the time? This is a very important factor. Properly making your website search engine friendly is not something that can be done in a few minutes- especially if the website is on a larger scale in size. The initial optimization may take hours or even days to make the website search engine optimized.

3. Do you have the dedication? Even if you have the initial time, what about later on down the road? Every single time that content is added to the website or anything is updated; the SEO has to be maintained as well. In order to ensure that your search engine ranking stays where it is (if it’s at the top), or continues to move up, the SEO will constantly need to be kept track of.

4. Is it cost effective? One of the main reasons that people decide to give SEO a shot themselves, is so that can save money. The time that you are spending on the SEO for your website though, could be spent devoted to other things that make you money. If you are selling a product for example, you would be taking time away from making those products or time away from doing business. If this is the case, are you really saving yourself money in the end?

5. Are you prepared to hire a professional if the results you get aren’t what you thought they would be? Many times, those who give SEO a shot spend a great amount of time trying to make their website search engine optimized, but do not end up with the results that they thought they would. If you give it a go yourself, you need to be prepared to hire a professional if you find that your skills are not what you thought they would be. You also need to consider that during this time period, your website may not be receiving the traffic you need.

While there are some website owners out there who are very successful doing their own SEO, you need to consider the factors above before you make your decision. More often than not, SEO is better left up the professionals who work with it on a daily basis.

Inbound links are links which come from other websites to your website. Unlike reciprocal links however, inbound links are not mutual and your website does not link back to the site which has an inbound link to your website.

What is the purpose of inbound links? Inbound links provide a way for users to enter your website from another website. Simply, they are a way to generate traffic. A person will go to website A looking for information and products. During their visit, they will see a link to your website (Website B) and may be tempted to click the link which will bring them to your site.

Concerning SEO, inbound links are highly valued due to the fact that good inbound links to your website can drive up your search engine ranking or get your website indexed if you have a new site. When a website that is trusted by the search engine, links to your website, the search engine is more apt to trust your website. The search engine views the website where the inbound link is as an important website (if it has a high ranking). When your website is associated with what search engines consider important content, the search engines will value your content as well.

If you have a website which has not been indexed by the search engine yet, inbound links can help in this area as well. When a search engine crawler scans a website, it can enter into other websites through links. If a link to your website appears on another website which is scanned often, you have a better chance of your website getting indexed.

The basics to remember about incoming links, is that they track back to your website, they increase traffic and they can provide your website with better search engine rankings if done properly.

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is highly associated with the act of a website having the right qualities to get listed high up in the search engine rankings. SEO is an algorithmic process that is used to improve the certainty that users will visit your website.

SEO works by improving the content of a website and editing the website code. Search engine optimization will also make sure that the right keywords are in place and by eliminating items on a website that may be preventing it from being properly indexed (listed) in the search engines.

SEM stands for search engine marketing. SEM is becoming a popular way to increase your websites visibility in search engine results. When you search for a product, service or piece of information on the Internet, you may notice links to websites that appear at the very top of the search engine results. SEM results can also appear on the sidebar of the search engine results, or on websites themselves.

In simple terms, SEM is a paid advertisement for your website which is displayed on search engine results or on websites owned by another person or company. Google Ad Words and Microsoft Ad Center are two highly known SEM tools. When you use an SEM service, the more you are willing to pay for the advertisement, the more frequently your ad will appear in the search engines and on other websites.

The nice thing about SEM is that it is relevant to what you are marketing. If your website is based on your Public Relations Company, your ads will display when people search for Public Relations keywords. They can also be listed on other websites which are about or mention Public Relations.

PPC stands for pay per click and it is related to SEM. When you use SEM to place an advertisement of your website, it would not make any sense to pay for those ads if no one is clicking on them. Due to this, most SEM services only charge your account when someone clicks on your advertisement.

For example, if you place an advertisement using Google Ad Words, you will only be charged when an Internet user clicks on your advertisement. How much you get charged per click is dependent on a few different factors.

The more money you are willing to pay per click, the higher your ads will appear in the search engine results. The amount you are willing to pay will also affect the frequency of your advertisement appearing. If you are willing to pay a few cents per click, your advertisement will not be seen as often or be as visible as it would be if you are willing to pay $1.00 per click.

SEO, SEM and PPC have become the main three tools in effective Internet marketing over the past few years. Website owners have found that using SEO, SEM and PPC is an easy strategy in ensuring that their website is widely visible and receives a high traffic count.

SEO includes natural methods of making a website search engine friendly. Changes are made to the website itself for the purpose of trying to make search engines recognize the website as important and popular. Every search engine uses algorithms (mathematical processes), to determine how popular and important a website is. The search engine then uses these algorithms to determine where a website shows up in the search engine results when specific keyword terms are searched by users.

When a website is search engine optimized, the focus is placed on quality keywords, quality content, proper html code and inbound links to name a few. These are things which can naturally be changed to give a website a leg up in the search engine results.

Regarding SEM, some will argue that it includes all aspects of search engine marketing (including SEO), while others argue that SEM deals more with pay per click (PPC) and paid online advertising. When it comes down to it, any form of online website marketing can be deemed SEM. SEM includes the use of SEO and other marketing methods such as paid advertisements and pay per click ads.

The main difference is that SEO just covers the natural methods of making a website search engine friendly while SEM covers a broad spectrum of online website marketing. Some websites only use SEO to gain an advantage in the search engines, while other websites take advantage of the other online marketing resources which are available to them.

One of the reasons why website owners may use other SEM tactics aside from SEO is due to the fact that natural SEO takes time. Even a properly optimized website will not display as the number one website in search engine results right away. It takes time for natural methods to move the website higher up in the search engine results. If a website owner wants to see traffic results right away, they may opt to use PPC or online advertising methods to make their website visible.

When using these other methods of online advertising, a website owner pays a fee to search engines for displaying their website information where users can easily find it. Most often times, these ads will display at the very top of search engine results or on the sidebar. The advertising fee is only charged when a user clicks on the ad (PPC or pay per click). These ads may also appear on other websites that has content which is relevant to the advertising website’s content.

There is also straight advertising on someone else’s website. This often includes having banner or graphic ads displayed on a website with the purpose of promoting your website. The advertising cost is paid to the website owner or company directly. Some websites also offer pay per click advertising like the search engines as well. There are several ways a website can be marketed online. SEM covers all of these methods, while SEO only covers the natural methods and changes which are made to a website to make it search engine friendly.

- Quality Content. To properly optimize your website, the written content needs to be of excellent quality and needs to have properly placed keywords. A simple Internet search on what keywords you will need and the proper density of the keywords within your content can show you the way. But even with the proper keywords and keyword density, are you a good writer? Even if the search engines pick up on the keywords and list your website near the top, users will not come back or stay awhile if the content is poorly written.

- Proper html coding. You do not have to be a genius computer programmer to know html coding, but it doesn’t hurt either. You will however need the knowledge of being able to find html errors and knowing how to insert or fix html code.

- Have good marketing qualities. To properly optimize your website, you will need good incoming links to your site from other websites. Do you know the proper etiquette and skills that it takes to convince other website owners to link their site to yours?

- Not spending time on things that will not give you an advantage. Different search engines have different requirements when it comes to what websites they feel are the most important. One mistake people often make when trying to optimize their website is following the guidelines of one search engine’s requirements but not taking into account other search engine’s requirements.

If Google is where you want your website to show up, optimizing your website for Yahoo probably won’t get you to where you want to be. Others also spend time on old tactics and things that are obsolete. For example, many search engines do not give META tags credit anymore but several people still rely on them to give them an edge in the search engine results.

Of course those are just a few of the important optimization areas. It is not a hard task to complete at all, but you do need to have the proper skills to do it (or be willing to learn the skills). You also need all of the information you can find to make sure that you are optimizing your site the best that it can be.

It is actually quite easy to tell if your website has been banned if you know a few simple tricks. First, go to the search engine page and type in ìsite:î followed by the website address. Make sure to not place a space between the colon after the word ìsiteî and your website address. Do pages from your website show up in the results? If they do, then you have nothing to worry about as your website is not banned. However, if the results state that no information can be returned, then your website may have been banned by the search engine.

Next, you can also try typing in ìlink:î in front of the website address in the search engine. This will tell you the inbound links that your website has. If you know that you should have inbound links from other websites and no links show up, the search engine may have banned your website.

You can also do a simple search for the domain name in the search engine bar to see if anything shows up. Once again, if information shows up, your website is not banned, but if no information can be found than it could be banned.

When trying to determine whether or not your website has been banned, it is important to remember that search engines do not index websites instantly as soon as they are published on the web. Information may not be showing up simply for the fact that your website has not been indexed yet. You should check in a few different search engines so you can get a good idea of whether or not your website shows up in any of them.

If your website was indexed (and you used to be able to find it), but then it all disappeared, being banned is a good possibility. If you find that your website has been banned, now is a good time to start researching what got your website banned by the search engines so you can avoid this situation in the future.

SEO, which is also known as search engine optimization is the key resource in ensuring that your website will make it to the top of search engine listings. Why do you want your website listed at the top? Research has shown that Internet users will view the websites which are the easiest to find. If your website does not have visitors, than your product will not sell, your service will not be known and your information will never be read.

Think of your own Internet habits when considering SEO. When you search for a term, do you click on the first relevant page which pops up, or do you look at several pages before making the click? Chances are, you do not waste your time by looking through multiple pages of website listings before you click on one. This is exactly how most Internet users function as well. People in today’s society are in need of finding the information or services they need in a quick manner. Whether they are performing work related tasks or just enjoying a relaxing day browsing the Internet, wasted time is something that no one wants to experience.

Some Internet Marketing Professionals may argue that traditional Internet advertisement is just as effective in getting traffic to your website. Rather than concentrating on SEO, concentration is placed on banner ads and pop up advertisements which drive traffic to a certain website. While these tactics can be effective, they can also be costly.

SEO is an effective way to get your website high up in the Internet search engine rankings without a high overhead cost. With proper SEO in place, your website will advertise itself by constantly being on the first page of the search results.

Every year, thousands of websites are built and then forgotten about. Why? Often times, good websites are left to fade away by their owners or web masters because they are not getting the traffic or results which were intended. The main reason why these websites never get the results is due to the fact that they are never found by Internet users. Once a website owner realizes that they are not getting the results they need to sustain the operation of the website, updates cease and products quit being uploaded. All of this could have been avoided if the website owner would have opted to use simple SEO tactics in regards to their website.

Having your website search engine optimized includes performing a few certain tasks which can have your website appearing on the first page of search engine results within a very short period of time. It will save you time, money, and most of all; it will save you loads of frustration.

The first thing to consider is your website’s market. If your website is about online flower delivery, you have several websites which have been in business for many years that you will be competing with. In the land of search engine results, it is all about age, trust and reliability. Sounds like a relationship doesn’t it? In essence, it is a relationship- one between your website and the search engines. Now let’s look at a market which is not as flooded as online flower ordering and delivery. Your website is about collecting and selling vintage hair clips and barrettes.

Here, we find a smaller market which has not been taken over by large companies or companies which have been in business on the web a great deal of time. The smaller the market your website is in, the better chance you have of obtaining a high ranking in a faster amount of time. If you are placing your website into a pile of other sites which have been in business for years and have already gained search engine trust, it is going to take longer to see your desired results.

Another factor to consider is how often your website gets scanned by search engine crawlers, spiders and robots. These automated programs scan websites for content, updates and information. If your website is well known with a good amount of incoming links from other websites, the optimization updates which were made to your website may be recognized by the search engines in a short amount of time. However, if your website is unknown, has little traffic or is linked from other websites which have low rankings, it could take a long time for your website to be scanned and updated within the search engine results. Of course if your website is properly optimized, it will have good incoming links for crawlers to enter through.

How long it will take to gain good search engine rankings essentially depends on the market your website is in and when it gets scanned by search engines crawlers who will then recognize the optimization which was made. While there is no solid answer to the question, the time period can be as little as a few days or as long as months before you start seeing the results you desire. It is very important with optimization to have realistic goals. Having your website optimized yesterday will not make it the number one website the next day, but it will give it a better shot of being number one in the future.

Black hat SEO is a term used in relation to unethical SEO practices. Unethical SEO tactics are those which are highly frowned upon by the search engines. People use black hat SEO to spam the search engines and try to gain an unfair advantage in the search engine results.

Some of the tactics which are used in black hat SEO are; using doorway pages, spamming the search engine submission process, keyword stuffing, cloaking and using automated programs to create link farms.

Why are those methods considered unethical? Search engines value placing websites with quality content and important information in the top of the search engine results. Unethical SEO tactics can get websites which are little to no importance placed in the top of the results. Most of these websites which use black hate SEO tactics are put on the Internet to spam people or make money off of unknowing users.

White hat SEO is the opposite of black hat SEO. White hat SEO uses ethical techniques to get a website moved high up in the search engine results. These methods include; good website design, proper html code, quality content, quality keywords, proper keyword density and inbound links.

When a website is designed correctly using white hat SEO, search engines feel these websites are valuable and important websites that should be easy to find. Of course you can have a properly optimized website which is still pretty buried, but that could be due to the market that your website is competing in as well.

White hat SEO is looked upon by the search engines as acceptable and ethical. Using black hat SEO on the other hand can actually get your website penalized or all together banned by the search engines. One of the number one reasons why websites get banned from the search engines is due to the use of black hat SEO tactics.

What this means is that Google checks the IP address of your computer and based upon what it is, it makes a decision where you are based and brings back results ‘close’ to you… hopefully.

After searching through a few local results, I would have to say the change (despite its major importance and potential) isn’t perfect. It seems the listings are based on too broad of a geographic area but it generally brings up Brisbane listings when you’re in Brisbane and Gold Coast ones when you login there.

Don’t get me wrong: this is perhaps one of the most important local search developments in years. I advise every company to sign up to Google Maps immediately, as the trend towards IP matching will continue and get more effective with time.

If you need help with what to do, contact Promote SEO on 07 3102 8312 today and we will take care of it for you.

Brisbane Local Search

The use of SEO in local search is particulary effective but also competitive. If you are looking to use SEO in a Brisbane finance, travel or banking related business, you should be prepared to employ the services of a professional SEO company like Promote or bring someone in house due to the number of companies wanting the top 5 spots in Google.

SEO Campaigns

An effective SEO campaign should include content development, onsite seo, link building on an ongoing basis. In most cases, one off SEO jobs do not succeed in the big traffic keywords or phrases. It might work well for 4 or 5 word phrases but then the competition for those is often low.

If you are looking to attract local organic traffic but are unsure where to start, call Promote on our local Brisbane number 07 3102 8312 today and we will do our best to help and work with you.

SEO will bring in traffic from all sorts of search keywords for months and years if you set it up right from the start and continue to follow the basic principles when adding new pages to your website. Search engine optimisation can help you capture leads from a wide range of searches and bring them to your site.

We believe the SEO and Adwords can work together. Instant traffic whilst building free traffic then use your Adwords as a quick source of business when you need it. No matter how you look at it, there is a place for SEO and PPC in online traffic building.

If you are competing in a larger more agressive business market like Brisbane or Gold Coast, optimising a small site will not be enough to get you to the top of the Google results in many cases. An ongoing campaign of content development, link building and maintenance will be required. In most cases a site with more pages in it, covering a range of products and services, will work better for SEO.

The best sites continue to grow, add new pages and evolve as each month passes. It’s difficult to keep up the ongoing work but well worth it.

1. Does the company offer onsite and offsite SEO?

• Why is this important? Well many companies offer onsite SEO where they fix your meta tags and adjust your content for Google but this is only part of the SEO process. In a competitive market (which is starting to be all markets) this alone will not deliver long term traffic unless you have a large number of pages in your site. Offsite SEO processes such as link building strengthen your rankings and are used the the Google SEO formula.

2. Does the SEO company offer ongoing maintenance and offsite SEO?

• It seems quite obvious when you think about it but when you get your site higher rankings, your competitors are going to notice and probably take action themselves. Ongoing link building via international and local sites helps to improve your ‘holding’ power against sites that don’t use it.

There are other things to conside such as the companies experience, how you feel when you  meet with them and what else they bring to the table such as real world online sales experience.

Have they walked the walk they want you to take?

Brad Hauck
Promote Internet Marketing

Thank you for the excellent results you have obtained for Exhibitek Displays through your search engine optimisation on our web site.

Your optimisation process has increased our sales directly from internet searches by 698% over the same quarter compared to last year.

Our goal was to take our web site from just a brochure to being an effective sales tool. We have actually been surprised by the results, they have exceeded our expectations.

Sincerely, Joe & Sue Borg

So an increase like that certainly gives food for thought when looking at how you spend your advertising budget. Maybe allocate $$ to ongoing web SEO

There’s no point in showing up for your business name as under Australian law all names must be different. So if you do plumbing, you want to show up for plumbing or plumbers and probably within your local area too as most companies tend to service a set geographical area.

So back to the question, if you want your Google SEO to work for you and have no idea where to start, call Promote SEO today on 07 3102 8312 and we will do it for you

Why but? Well it can be relatively easy to lift a site up the rankings in a short period for a range of keywords but the real difficulty is in keeping it there. A 5 page website is going to have a harder time staying up there when compared to a 1000 page website where all the pages talk about the main keyword and have related content.

Our experience is that you need to keep building, if not adding pages to your site, building links back from articles, directories, social bookmarking and other sources of backlinks such as videos, press releases online, news, blogging and newsgroups.
We have a policy of ongoing link building to help build strength in your rankings. The search engines do see links back to your site as one indicator that you are seen as a leader in your field. Our testing has shown that along with adjustments to your pages, this is one of the most important parts of the search engine optimisation process.
Links to your site don’t appear overnight in Google or Yahoo either. Even after the link is built, you have to wait for the search engines to go an index the site it is on and that could take weeks. Even though we only link from PageRank 2 – 7 sites, we have no way of telling how fast the links will become visible on the search engines.  Statistics show us that it is a logarithmic jump (example figures):

Month 1 – Submitted 300 links – You see 2 links

Month 2 – Submitted 300 links – You see 39 links

Month 3 – Submitted 300 links – You see 102 links

Obviously, over time we expect to see all of the links built show up but that depends on how active the search engines are.

So, in the end, the cumulative effect of the adjustment of pages, link building, etc gives you an advantage that most sites don’t have and that is being able to adjust to the search engines requirements and be found everywhere so you don’t just rely on the search engines for your traffic.

Obviously if you are paying $1 per person but making $300 profit per product sold to every 10th person then you aren’t about to turn off this stream of traffic. Of course if you were getting those visitors for free, it would be another $10 in your pocket or another 3% profit on your bottom line.

In some cases, we have worked with companies where the cost of their clicks and overheads was eating up their profit to the point where even with hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales, they weren’t making any bankable profit at the end of the month!

So what is the point that I’m making?

PPC is a useful tool but why not put some effort into getting those visitors for free? Not to mention that they continue to come long after the initial work is done and by building on it, you can increase the numbers greatly. All you need to do is keep building on your work.

By using a search engine optimisation specialist company like Promote, not only do you get the work of a specialist but it leaves you free to carry on your business as usual and deal with the new business your website will be creating. SEO maintenance plans provide ongoing adjustments and tracking of your rankings, link building and up to date advice.

In some cases, we have worked with companies where the cost of their clicks and overheads was eating up their profit to the point where even with hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales, they weren’t making any bankable profit at the end of the month!

So what is the point that I’m making?

PPC is a useful tool but why not put some effort into getting those visitors for free? Not to mention that they continue to come long after the initial work is done and by building on it, you can increase the numbers greatly. All you need to do is keep building on your work.

By using a search engine optimisation specialist company like Promote, not only do you get the work of a specialist but it leaves you free to carry on your business as usual and deal with the new business your website will be creating. SEO maintenance plans provide ongoing adjustments and tracking of your rankings, link building and up to date advice.

We consider SEO the most important step, after good site design, towards success online. If you understand how to increase your visitors, you can increase your sales. It’s a simple mathematical formula – more people in, more $ out. If you don’t understand how to increase your visitors, then you bring a team like to crew at Promote Search Engine Marketing in to take care of it for you.

By preparing your site for the search engines, you increase your chances of getting high rankings. Fixing metatags like your titles (what shows up in the blue bar at the very top of your browser window) and descriptions is one step that helps you to show up for a wider range of searches. It is also important to target every page towards one topic so that you don’t give the search engine mixed messages. For example, if your site is about dogs, don’t start a page talking about dog collars and finish up talking about cat collars. If you desperately need to talk about cat collars, make a new page and just link off your dog collars page.

If you don’t know about these things or have someone on staff who does, you can contract Promote to do it all for you. Its hard to keep up with everything that is going on online so don’t… hire a professional team for much less than the cost of giving your staff basic training in SEO not to mention we have been selling online since 1996.

At the moment, Google is the king of search engines and for the foreseeable future it will continue to be. This is why it is worth spending time concentrating on optimising your website for this search engine first. Statistically Google gets around 66% of all search traffic and the rest is split between the rest.

In most cases, our clients see little traffic from other search engines at first but after a time it grows to about 25% from MSN Live and Yahoo.  This is why we spend so much of our time studying googles nuances and how we can apply it to our search engine optimisation work. Google makes little changes but overall if you approach your website methodically, you can get great rankings across a range of keywords.

Best of all, the work you do for Google will help you right across the board with the thousands of other search engines worldwide. Remember though that normally, Google will determine your location from information on your website so you are more likely to show up highly in the local Google than Google.com (unless you are in the US).

Get Google… and they will get you to the world!

Small businesses often target a specific niche market or client and in online promotion, this is a distinct advantage. It is far easier to promote your site to a niche market than to a general market e.g. border collie breeders vs dog breeders. When working out who you want to attract to your site, you should consider this. Is there any point in attracting everyone looking for dog breeders when you only sell border collies? You may get lots of traffic but are they really your potential client or just empty numbers?

One thing that is important to think about is that many small business sites lack content. They have 5 – 10 pages which is fine when there is not much competition in the market place but as competition grows (as it is now rapidly doing), you will need to think about adding more content/pages. Make sure that your website has the ability to expand under your control and don’t rely on having to send things to the programmers.

All modern sites should really be build on some sort of content management system (CMS) and there is plenty around. A nice easy one that the search engines love is the blogging software – WordPress (www.wordpress.org). It allows you to set it up to look like a normal site but everytime you add a page, it tells the search engines and they index it. Our record is now 12 minutes to have a page listed in Google… try that with a normal site!

Search engine optimisation will allow you to lead your market and bring in leads to your business that other businesses aren’t getting. The online market is growing all the time and all you have to do is ask people and you will find that they Google before they Yellow Pages these days… especially younger staff members!

Why but?

Well it can be relatively easy to lift a site up the rankings in a short period for a range of keywords but the real difficulty is in keeping it there. A 5 page website is going to have a harder time staying up there when compared to a 1000 page website where all the pages talk about the main keyword and have related content.

Our experience is that you need to keep building, if not adding pages to your site, building links back from articles, directories, social bookmarking and other sources of backlinks such as videos, press releases online, news, blogging and newsgroups.

We have a policy of ongoing link building to help build strength in your rankings. The search engines do see links back to your site as one indicator that you are seen as a leader in your field. Our testing has shown that along with adjustments to your pages, this is one of the most important parts of the search engine optimisation process.

Links to your site don’t appear overnight in Google or Yahoo either. Even after the link is built, you have to wait for the search engines to go an index the site it is on and that could take weeks. Even though we only link from PageRank 2 – 7 sites, we have no way of telling how fast the links will become visible on the search engines.  Statistics show us that it is a logarithmic jump:

Month 1 – Submitted 300 links – See 2 links
Month 2 – Submitted 300 links – See 39 links
Month 3 – Submitted 300 links – See 102 links

Obviously, over time we expect to see all of the links built show up but that depends on how active the search engines are.

So, in the end, the cumulative effect of the adjustment of pages, link building, etc gives you an advantage that most sites don’t have and that is being able to adjust to the search engines requirements and be found everywhere so you don’t just rely on the search engines for your traffic.