Search Engine Optimization

Definition  Search engine optimization or SEO, is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a website by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the more likely it is to be visited.  Search Engine Optimization helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

Keyword Research  Brainstorm  Use any past PPC data  Expand keyword list by using online tools  Overture: - click on search term suggestion tool  Wordtracker  Google Adwords  Select Your Keywords  Arrange keywords into themes

In the Code  Title - very important - first thing that is read and classified  Description - have good concise description with a few keywords in it.  Keywords - meta tags - have become kind of obsolete - they are not really used by the major search engines because of bad programming practices in the past, but some spider this to spit out results so it’s good to have some 5 to 10 keywords in the meta tags.  Most important: Have best keywords in the content of the page and especially in links. GOOD CONTENT is essential.

Site Submission  Google:  Yahoo: search.yahoo.com/info.submit.html  MSN:  AOL  Inktomi  Ask Jeeves  DMOZ  Submit Express:

Google Page Rank  Internal linking - more relevant pages = higher ranking  Back linking - more inbound links = higher ranking  this.com/google/google_pagerank_explaine d.asp

Search Engine Decoder  this.com/search_engine_decoder.asp - this is a cool decoder that visually shows how all the search engines, directories etc are related. It’s useful to most efficiently submit sites to the places that get sites to other ones. this.com/search_engine_decoder.asp this.com/search_engine_decoder.asp

Few things to consider  You have to be careful about what programs you use to create links. It’s advised that you do not create links in the following forms:  JavaScript or DHTML  Flash or other Macromedia  Image maps  Java Applets  Navigation buttons  If you do use these make sure to have text based versions of these links at the bottom of the page and also use sitemaps so that the spiders can filter down to all the pages on the site.

Some good resources  this.com/search_engine_decoder.asp this.com/search_engine_decoder.asp this.com/search_engine_decoder.asp   