Search Engine Optimization

Provided By Dr Michael Teng
How does a customer know you exist?

     How Do Search Engines Find Information
     Factors affecting ranking of a particular resource (website)
     Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
     Search Engine Submission
     Some Optimizations Tips
     Measuring your SEO Progress

How Do Search Engines Find Information
Search Engines are huge searchable databases of resources extracted from the Internet by
the process of " crawling ". This is just like sending the genie to crawl over all the resources
and return with the resources that match the word and phrases ( keywords ) in the user's
query. These resources are then sorted out and displayed in the results according to probable
relevancy. The most relevant resources or websites are ranked high and hence are displayed
in the top results.
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Factors affecting ranking of a particular resource (website)

Web Content Factors
- Word Frequency
- Location of keywords in the document
- Number of pages in the site containing the keywords (Relational Clustering)
- The time taken by the website to load
External Factors
- Link popularity
- Link relevancy
- Click popularity
- Length of stay
- Length of domain
- Demographic popularity
- Frequency of Updates
- Google Page rank
- Results from partner search site are ranked higher
- Paid placements are ranked high
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Though there are several advanced techniques for Internet Marketing, search engines are as
much relevant as they were years ago. This is because Search Engines act like an entry point
on the web for most users looking for information. The fact that your website shows up in the
web search is still the most promising tool of attracting prospects to your business to know
about the products and services you have to offer. Search Engine Optimizaiton or SEO of your
website, therefore, must not be taken lightly.

SEO means anticipating the keywords which the user would use to search information across
a search engine, and placing these keywords in strategic locations across your website to
attract a search engine. Such locations are: (Your website creators would be able to do this
for you)

Domain name
Page title
Alt tags
Keywords meta-tags
Description meta-tages
Comments tag
Robots tag

It is therefore critical:
- To choose the right title tag
- To have your website designed and set up correctly
- To have the right content - It's no point working so hard to get a visitor to your website,
when he cannot find anything of use in it.

Taking care of the procedures above will ensure that your website is now optimized for
Search Engines. The better the optimization, the better the chances of your website being
ranked better by search engines and get visited by prospective customers.
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Search Engine Submission
You can submit your site to search engines for free or via the paid search engine programs.
You need to go to search engines and look out for the "Suggest a site" or "Add URL" button.
Then type in your website address there and you are registered.

Now whenever a surfer would use keywords matching your site, the title and description of
your website would appear among the results and the chances of your site getting visited
gets better and better. You can submit your site to specialized directories as well. If you
are an event management company   you better get listed for a web director of
entertainment and event management companies.

Paid Submission
One of the major players in paid submission today is Google Adwords. Here you decide
on the keywords most relevant to your business. You can then have your advert placed
right on the page where the results would be displayed for a particular keyword search. You
pay only and only if the visitor while scanning through the result page, notices your ad and
clicks it to reach your website. In case the surfer does not click on your advert, you don't
pay. To be precise, you pay per click.

This type of PPC or CPC (Paid Per Click and Cost Per Click respectively) advertising is known
as " Search advertising ". The effectiveness if this type of advertising can be ascertained
from the fact that players like Yahoo and Google not only sell these ads on heir search
engines but as well as through their network of other search engines and other websites
like ESPN, MSN, CNN and many more. Though many people still prefer "Organic" results of
a search engine than Pay per Click, the number of people clicking on adverts is increasing.

Advantages of Search Advertising
- The advertisers pay only when their advert is actually clicked by the surfer and is led to
  their site thereby ensuring that they get value for money.
- The surfers clicking on the adverts are the ones who are already searching information on
  the same keywords. The businesses thus have a clear advantage of getting attention to
their target audience.
- By getting your ad displayed in Google Adwords and Yahoo Search, businesses can reach
maximum number of Internet users in a very short time thereby making huge savings on
time, effort and money. Google, Yahoo and SN constitute about 90% of the search
results.
- You can spread the word around about your business in no time.
- Businesses don't need to worry about spam. Surfers will decide to visit your site or not.
- The copy of the ad can be changed, modified, or stopped anytime.
- You can even place more than one advert of yours.
- Website built on high end software like flash can really benefit from their ads getting
displayed along with search results as search engine crawlers having difficulty listing flash
sites.

Contextual Advertising
This kind of adverting involves placing relevant ads on the advertising space of various
webpages. a surfer would browse looking for information. It is based on the logic you must
be able to get noticed while a surfer is looking for specific product or services in the line of
your business. Though the chances of a surfer actually buying your product may be less
than in search advertising, it's a good way to add your brand to the knowledge of the surfer
so that it helps them make a buying decision later.

Over 70% of Internet users prefer to us the natural " organic " results of a search engine
and by using an SEO Consultant you can gain significant traffic over a long-term period and
achieve sales and enquiries at a much lower cost than PPC over a longer period.
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Some Optimizations Tips
1.   Place spider food all along your site. Use keywords heavily. Place key phrases within
      the first 25 words of your site. Keywords must have around 5% - 7% density.
2.   Website design must be to the liking of search engines. Prefer HTML and text over
      graphics and other page formats. A site made in Macromedia Flash would make it
      difficult for the search to crawl through them.
3.   A site map may not be of great use to visitors but helps the search engine to properly
      index your pages in its database.
4.   Use Copyright and About Us pages. Link all web pages to home page as well.
5.   Every page must have a static link of its own. Websites made on flash are at a
     disadvantage here.
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Measuring your SEO Progress
Here are some resources that will help you measure your SEO performance.

www.wwebsiteoptimization.com/services/analyze
- Analyzes speed, size etc and advises accordingly

www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports
- This is an excellent tool that gives you in a tabular format your sites ranking in top
search engines for free.

www.nichebot.com
- keyword analysis tool.
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