What is SEO
SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow search engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major search engines.
You see, when people use a search engine, they generally dont look beyond the top 20 or so results. If you want to make any money from your website, you need to get ranked in the top 20 out of potentially hundreds of websites.
How Does SEO Work
Search engines maintain a huge database containing information from individual websites. Most of the information search engines collect isnt listed on their results pages, but it is taken into consideration when it comes to deciding those results rankings.
It is very important that you encourage the search engines to rank your website in a high position, and you can do this through the keywords that you use on your website, as well as when you submit it. If the keywords you use in your submission tool dont match the ones on your site then you could harm your rankings - be sure to have all the keywords you want to use on the website itself before you submit it.
Most websites dont focus on their topic well, and so keyword lists containing 50 or more phrases per page are recommended. By focusing some of the pages of your site on keywords, you will score higher with the search engines.
Free Search Engines.
The major search engines on the Internet are still free, and its not hard to take advantage of this free advertising - you can do it in as little as an hour.
There are several companies that provide free SEO tools, or you can pay a professional to take care of it for you. Looking around on the web will turn up all sorts of useful resources.
What is Unethical SEO
Unethical search engine optimization techniques can be unlawful, unscrupulous, or just in bad taste. Youd be surprised how many people use these methods. A lot of what is now called unethical SEO used to be accepted, until people went overboard and it started to have a negative affect on the web as a whole.
Keyword stuffing is when your site consists of long lists of keywords and nothing else. Dont do it. There are ways to put keywords and phrases on your site without running the risk of getting banned.
You may have seen invisible text if youve been selecting the text on a page and found words that are the same color as the background. This text is often lists of keywords put there in the hope of fooling search engine spiders while hiding the words from visitors. This is considered unethical, and you shouldnt do it.
A doorway page is a page that isnt designed for real people to see - its purely for the search engines and spiders, in an attempt to trick them into indexing the website in a higher position. This is a big no-no and should be avoided.
Even though unethical SEO is tempting, and does work, you shouldnt do it - not only is it annoying to users, but its likely to get you banned from the search engines sooner or later. You sites search engine rankings just arent worth the risk. Use efficient SEO techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like unethical SEO.
SEO is a set of techniques used in order to attract visitors or prospective customers to your website, and the goal of a search engine is to provide high quality content to the users of the Internet. These two objectives are not in opposition, if you do SEO the way it should be done.
Chris Taylor CEO Catdynamics, author, marketing & SEO Specialist.
Search Engine Optimization Training - Sky Rocket Your Search Engine Rankings In Less Than 30 Days. Visit today.
Try an Experiment
If you have a web site, try this experiment when you have some spare time. Pick a nonsense phrase, like bed happy meatball or anything equally silly. Make sure its something very unlikely to appear on a web page anywhere, and make sure its a phrase (not a single word). Also, make sure it does not appear on your own site.
Next, get a few friends or co-workers with web sites of their own to post a link to your site using that exact phrase (without the quotation marks) as the anchor text. Whats anchor text, you ask Its simply the word or words that form the clickable part of a link.
Now, wait a while. Make a note to yourself to check your web sites ranking in the results for a search of your chosen nonsense phrase at a major search engine in a month or two. Unless you picked a phrase that actually appears on other sites, youll find that your site is #1! Moreover, thats in spite of the fact that the chosen phrase does not appear anywhere on your actual web site. Think about that.
An infamous, large-scale example of this same test involved the phrase miserable failure. Some enterprising bloggers got together a few years ago and decided to link lots of sites to the official biography page for President George W. Bush at the whitehouse.gov site. The goal, of course, was to make that page show up in the #1 position whenever unsuspecting (or in this case, many suspecting) searchers typed in that phrase. It worked. (Side note: at last check, Michael Moore famous film maker and Bush detractor, was in the #2 position at Google for this same search). Again, keep in mind that the phrase miserable failure does not appear anywhere on either mans web site.
Is There a Point
OK, so why bother with this seemingly asinine experiment (thats actually been dubbed Googlebombing) Ahh, Grasshopper, for the lesson it imparts. Which is Well, it points to the power of anchor text in determining search engine ranking. And it has definite relevance to your activities as a webmaster.
Many of your fellow site owners - including a lot of them who run sites in direct competition with yours have never heard of anchor text. Some of you reading this may be unfamiliar with it. But, as should be clear now, anchor text plays a major role in search engine ranking positions.
In basic terms, it works like this
Search engines rely on links to help them ascertain both the theme of a given web site and its popularity. Knowing that, consider two scenarios. In the first, your site has built up a lot of links pointing to it, and each one has your domain name as the clickable part of the link (anchor text). Lets say your domain name is your companys name, JoeSmithBakery.com and you sell baking supplies. OK, great now your site will show up in the #1 position at the search engines whenever anyone searches for your domain name! Hmm. Think that one through. If they know your domain name, why would they need a search engine to find it
In the second scenario, you have lots of links pointing to your bakery site, but instead of the domain name as the anchor text, you wisely chose a phrase that lots of people search for, like baking supplies.
Easy question: which would you prefer being #1 at Google when people search for your domain name or being #1 when people search for baking supplies This is why the anchor text you choose for the links you build is so important.
A Plan of Action
Now, heres a simple plan of action to improve your sites link situation and search engine ranking going forward from this day
Step 1 Research Keywords
A great service is provided by the folks at wordtracker.com. They catalog search activity at the major engines, and then make available those numbers to the general public. You simply type in a word or phrase related to your sites theme, and wordtracker shows you the number of times that entry is being searched at the major search engines. Cool, huh The service will also give you a list of related terms, so you can look for other important search words to target.
Step 2 Pick a Few and Get Some Links
Compile a list of several search terms that are most closely related to your sites theme and that get searched for often. Its up to you, of course, but you should pick those phrases that get a few hundred to several thousand searches. These will be the terms you use in the anchor text of the inbound links you build from now on. Doing so will really increase your sites search engine traffic - once all your new links begin to boost your rankings.
Nothing Else Changes
Now, just carry on with your usual link building activities: reciprocal links, one-way links from directories and article distributions, etc. The only change is to make sure you choose a phrase from your list to use as the clickable part of the link you ask for (the anchor text). If you rotate your choices, your site will move up in the rankings for each phrase. The only downside is that youll be getting fewer links per phrase, so it may take longer for any single phrase to rank high.
Keep in mind that the phrases you pick will be popular, unlike those in the examples that began this article. To score high rankings, youll need to be diligent and get lots of links. Never stop! Over time, this strategy will really help your sites traffic, but it does take time. As the famous poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, famously wrote: All good things come to those who wait.
John Schwartz http://www.web-article-writer.com (all rights reserved)
John Schwartz - of - offers professionally written web site content and articles, as well as article distribution services to increase web site traffic and build link popularity. Visit us today for more information.