SEO Codes

Today, the whole world is latching on to the internet and the prospects of online business have boomed extensively. With the internet as the medium of your business, one of your main concerns is to draw more users to your website and eventually turn them into consumers. To do this, there are available strategies of online marketing and promotion techniques that you can tap.

This is what SEO is all about. SEO can empower your website so that search engines will be able to list it prominently. In other words, with SEO, your website will be able to rank higher in search engines. The biggest benefit of SEO is that it helps you to gain an online presence for your business which is what you need to invite and attract more consumers. As a result, this will increase your sales and investment returns. Such marketing technique also is usually cost effective compared to any other means.

In the past few years, there is an apparent need for SEO as websites are being created with Java, Flash and images which the search engines cannot understand and consequently ignore. To elaborate this, if the content of your website is ignored by the search engines, then, they can't index your site. If your site isn't indexed, then, no one will find your site when searched in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. SEO on the other hand, can be your solution to this as it is also a process of analyzing your site and modifying it to enable the search engines to read it, understand it and index or catalog it correctly.

Recently, there are surveys that indicate that more and more people these days take the help of search engines when they are interested to know or purchase a product or service. If your website comes up in the first pages listed by a search engine, your business or service brand gets an online recognition. Thus, if you apply SEO techniques to your website, there are higher chances of a customer or client tracking you down for the business or service you provide.

In website’s search engine ranking, site structure plays an important aspect. Since search engines want to provide their users with relevant sources of information, they aim to find sites that are logically constructed and it makes sense also to expect a valuable source of information from a logical structure.

Preferably, any visitor to a certain website should be able to access every page on the site within three clicks from the homepage. Search engine spiders usually do not burrow deep into a site but instead they will try to capture the main sections. However, not all sites are able to position pages that close to the homepage. But there are some tactics to help spiders see more of a large site. One great solution is to create a site map that contains links to all the pages on the site. Another one is called intra-site linking. An example of this is by linking from a major page to a deeper page. Take note though that it is far better to use a keyword that relates to the destination page than something generic like “click here.” Search engine spiders can then use that link in finding the deeper page.

On the other hand, the site’s directory URL structure is also important. Placing keywords in the URLs may not be essential but it can be helpful. One way to get keywords into the URL is naming site directories using the keywords. If a section of the site is about a particular aspect of the overall site topic, you can use a keyword to name the section. Using a keyword to name a specific page is also beneficial. Moreover, search engines do use directory and pages names when determining a site’s relevance.

Finally, search friendly URLs contain information, including relevant keywords, that can help both search engines and people understand what a page is about by simply looking at them. So, in deciding for your URL, you must also thought of the users if they will have an idea about your site by simply looking at your URL.

Ranking is defined is defined as the web page’s listing and relative placement on a results page (known as SERP) for a certain search query. If you type a certain word or set of words into the search box at Google or any other search engine, there will be those listings displayed that Google deems most relevant to the search. By default, there are 10 listings per page and sorted in order of relative importance.

The most relevant and most important are then listed in descending order. The relevance of a certain web page is dependent on how well it matches a particular word search. On the other hand, the page’s importance is dependent on the quality and quantity of links that point to your web page from other websites.

Google, as your target search engine uses a sophisticated and proprietary algorithm for ranking websites that uses over 100 different criteria in the calculation, each of which is given a specific weighting which can change over time. As the algorithm may change, some techniques that may seem to work well may no longer work as well over time. Remember that there are no fixed methods in SEO or search engine optimization. Thus, without your knowledge, your site’s ranking may change for no apparent reason. So, you should always try, test, and refine your efforts and techniques in SEO.

On the other hand, Google, like any other search engines, uses automated software to read, analyze, compare, and rank your web pages. It is important to know what elements and factors Google cares about and how important these factors are in relation to each other.

When assessing the relevance to a particular topic, search engines place a lot emphasis on a site’s content. Before, search engines figured if a word was mentioned a lot on a page or site, then, that site must be relevant to that topic. Search engines then realized that this did not help provide their users with truly relevant results as it became far too common for people to stuff a site full of keywords. Since then, they lessened the emphasis they place on keyword density. Now, search engines are aiming for relevance aside from density. Thus, it is very essential to use target keyword(s) found in the target audience’s natural vocabulary.

Search engines usually look at the characteristics of a word on the web page when determining the importance of a certain word. This might include if it is linked to another page or is it in bold. These are some hints that search engines can use since it makes sense that a word that is somehow made to stand out has some importance.

On the other hand, a common content issue for websites is the duplicate content either both on the same site and amongst many websites. Search engines feel that it is important to direct their users to the most relevant and original version of the content. However, it can confuse the engines when identical content appears on a site in more than one place. One way to deal with this is to use the robots.txt file, a simple text file housed in the root directory of a website’s file structure that instructs web spiders to ignore a particular web page.

But search engine spiders cannot read all types of content. Some limitations include reading the text within Flash; interpreting the words in an audio file; and determining the words used within a video. Meanwhile, site designers can use tags (such as tags with images) to help the web spiders know what a piece of media is about. The Flash, audio, or video on the other hand, can also be surrounded by regular HTML text content that is descriptive of the content.

As Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, once was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, "Because that's where the money is." The same is true when it comes to SEO. You should place your SEO effort where the searches are, and where the value is. There are many other search engines out there, but today, Google is considered the most prominent, the most used, and most important of them all. Google is like an empire when we talk about search engines. Thus, when applying SEO techniques, Google should be your primary target search engine.

Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world and processes over one billion search requests and twenty petabytes of user-generated data every day. Also, Google currently provides search results to other partner search engines and directories. This means that a #1 ranking on Google will most likely result to a #1 raking on these partner sites. Thus, a #1 ranking on Google for a specific term means a #1 ranking on AOL, Netscape, Earthlink, Compuserve, Lycos, iWon.com, Go.com, and AT&T Worldnet!

At present, Google has the lion's share of searches. It will typically be 70% or more of any incoming search volume. So, Google is where you need to focus your website promotion effort first. On the other hand, the two other major search engines of importance are Yahoo and MSN Search. But if you do it well for Google, you will then expect great results for the other search engines.

If you’re just new to SEO or someone who just recently read an article regarding SEO and planning to apply the whole concept for your website, you should be familiarized first with a few terms. The terms I will identify below are the most often misundesrstood by beginners. There may be other terms that you’ll need to know, but let’s go to these important ones first.

Upper versus lowercase

You don’t need to worry about uppercase versus lowercase. Most search engines aren’t case sensitive.

Hyphenated words

Find hyphenated words, add both forms to your list, and determine which is more common because search engines treat them as different searches. For example, the dash in e-mail is far less frequently used, with email being the most common term. Generally, search engines treat a hyphen as a space.

Geo-specific terms

If geography is important to your business, don’t forget to include terms that include your city, state, other nearby cities, and so on.

Your company name

If you have a well-known company name, add that to the list, in whatever variations you can think of.

Other companies’ names and product names

If people will likely be searching for companies and products similar to yours, add those companies and products to your list. It’s also nice to know what people are looking for and how often they’re looking.

Using a keyword tool

After you’ve put together a decent-size keyword list, your next step is to use a keyword tool. This tool will enable you to discover additional terms you haven’t thought of and help you determine which terms are most important and which terms are used most often by people looking for your products and services. There are some keyword tools which are free and available on the net and there are some which are paid versions. I recommend using the Wordtracker as it is the world’s top search engine keyword tool

Looking closely at your list

After you’ve put together your initial list, go through it looking for more obvious additions. Don’t spend too much time on this; all you’re doing here is creating a preliminary list to run through a keyword tool, which will also figure out some of these things for you.

Obvious spelling mistakes

Think also of any obvious spelling mistakes while scanning through your list. Some spelling mistakes are important, with 10, 15, or 20 percent of all searches containing the word being misspelled, sometimes even more. For example, the word calendar is frequently misspelled. Some of its various misspellings are calender, calander, and calendar.

If the traffic from a misspelling is noteworthy, you may want to create a page on your site that uses that misspelling. One nice thing about misspellings is that you can grab the traffic without much trouble because more often competitors have missed them.

Synonyms

Sometimes words that have the same meaning are easily missed. For instance, the term home can also be searched as a house. But then, add it to the list because you may find quite a few searches related to it. Or you might even use a thesaurus to find more synonyms. However, there are some keyword tools that will run these kinds of searches for you.

Split or merged words

You may find that although your product name is one word, most people are searching for you using two words. For example, the term knowledgebase can also be used as knowledge base.

Recognizing Singulars and plurals

Go back to your list and add singulars and plurals. Most search engines treat singulars and plurals differently. An example of this is to search for book and books in Google. There are tools available on the net that will show the number of searches per day for a certain keyword/s. A great example is the Wordtracker. So it’s important to know which term is searched for most often.