Help With Search Engine Optimization

A search engine is one of the main ways web users find websites and the main search engine is Google. A good listing on Google means you will have a large increase in traffic and that's when you can start looking at turning this traffic into sales.

Submitting to a search engine is easy but achieving high search engine ranking can be quiet difficult. High ranking is based on a number of factors but one of the most important is ensuring your pages are search engine optimized making them accessible to the search engines. So now lets look at

(1) What are Search Engines
(2) How do they work
(3) How the algorithm works
(4) Search engine tips

(1) What are Search Engines:

Search engines are Web sites that help you search the Internet for other Web sites based on keywords you provide e.g. the keyword is the word you type into the search box. These search engines then crawls the internet looking for websites with this keyword in it, returning a list of sites with the highest rankings. Search engines themselves are made up of a number of different parts Spider - crawls your website checking your links and the general standard and layout of your pages.

(2) How do they work:

Well as discussed above you type your keyword into the search and hit go or submit, the search engine then crawls the internet looking for websites with this keyword in it returning thousands of sites. The search might only display 10 or so of these sites because it has determined that these sites are the most relevant based on it's ranking system. Everybody wants to be in the top 10 because being in the next 10 could mean you loose visitor and more importantly potential customers - so let see how they work by looking at google.

Search engines are based on rankings, Google is typical example of this. After submitting your site too google the Google bot will visit your site rank it and then move to next sites. Every search engine uses its own unique formula, called an algorithm, to index and score web sites. Google employs a ranking algorithm to give your pages an overall ranking. In google you receive a ranking of between 1 and 10, where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest rank. To view what your current ranking is download the google ranking toolbar - install it and you will see a page rank box at the top of your browser - if the green bar is halfway across you have a ranking of about 5 which is very good. http://toolbar.google.com/

(3) How the algorithm works

The google algorithm work by giving points based on certain factors such as

Links from other web pages to your site

What that means is the amount of links listed on other sites that link to your site! The more sites that link to you, the greater your popularity! The key to this is to do as many link exchanges as possible. A link exchange is basically you provide a link to a website and they link to you - be sure that the site that's linking to you is relative to what you are providing on the site. Try to add as many of these as possible, the more links the higher the ranking.

Meta Tags:

META tags are special HTML tags, located in the heading of the page, giving additional information about the page. They are intended for search engines. The description tag is used to give a description of your site which will be displayed in the search results. The keywords tag contains a list of keywords, separate either by commas or by spaces, these are highly relevant because these same keyword are used by web users to search these search engines. These tags and other factors dictate your sites placement in the search engines. Good meta tags contain words that describe your website. The google Robots scans the text on your pages to match the words in the meta tags with actual web page content. They set parameter and your content must fall within this to get increased points from the googlebot.

HTML Titles:

Search engines assign greater importance to text in certain locations on your page. One of the most important locations is your page title (the one that appears at the top of your browser) Learningsteps.com Interactive training. So having a relevant title is very important. Search engines will also check to see if a key phrase appears near the top of the page, in its headline or in the first few lines of text e.g. in the body. So add your title to the body make sure its in bold. Search engines consider how often a particular phrase appears relative to the other words on the page, so try and re-use your keywords.

(4)Search engine tips:

(1) Join as many relevant link exchanges as possible - the more links to your site the higher your ranking. I shall be adding a link exchange program shortly.

(2) The title tag on your page should be relevant and re-used throughout the page - search engines check importance of keywords.

(3) Use relevant keyword again re-use these in the page and make them bold.

(4) Constantly add more content - the google bot loves that content is being updated and added.

(5) Spelling: yes incorrect spelling can result in pages not being found or lost.

(6) Page size: ensure your page size is small especially your main page as web visitors will not wait more than 10 seconds.

Hope this page helps - I will add more information as i go along - achieving high ranking is an ongoing battle.

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