What exactly is Search Engine Optimization?

The Internet age has spawned a phenomenon of new terms, new jobs, and new career paths. The growth of the Worldwide Web is creating a new realm, where new types of internet-savvy folks engage in careers that require the skills of an intrepid explorer, searching for new worlds to discover. Among these new tasks are those that require the faster, more strategic placement or positioning of company adverts, documents, products or issues, in order for these entities to have the most maximum level of exposure in the web.

Exposure could mean a lot for different firms, organizations or groups seeking a wider venue to make their views heard, accepted, and patronized. The main term used for this web-positioning method is the seo, or the Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is the terminology used to define, or describe the action of gaining a better position within a search engine or internet directory system based upon a selected key word or a group of key words. With well over 4 billion documents already on the internet, the prominent search engines are all flaunting that they can locate most of them and show you a link from within their systems, and each of the search engines or directory providers have different guidelines by which a listing within their system is accomplished.

* Achieving Maximum exposure

As web-updated consumers, we are constantly on the lookout for sites that address our specific interests, goals, or products at a specified time and day. Most of us do not always know the URL (Universal Resource Locator) for all the types of businesses that can fulfill that interest, so we use a search engine or directory service to find them for us.

For example, I plan to go out and take my girlfriend with me to a bar, but I haven’t got an idea of which place to go to that I haven’t already been to yet. The next most probable step for me would be to go to a search engine and type in something like: “bars and restaurants pasadena ca"; I put in the quotation marks to make the search more specific, to get me closer to what I am looking for. The phrase I wrote, "bars and restaurants pasadena ca" will be used represent my main key word phrase.

Once I write those key words, I am, hopefully, going to get back a list of the restaurants within the greater Pasadena area, and I indeed got well over 500 or so choices too. What makes it more helpful is that I could find those assorted choices in the local phonebook listings. However, if I wish to make my list of choices much shorter, I would type in, or enter a new search maybe like: "jazz bar pasadena ca”.

Once the search engine has done its job, then I probably will get a shorter list with these new, more precise characteristics. However, the list created will be made in an order that is determined by the search engine. The first one may or may not be starting with the letter A or a number like the one on the phone directory.

From the bar and restaurant viewpoint, if they could be in the top 10 or 20 and get a lot of “hits” or visits by web users, they will have a chance of being seen by the searcher. This is what Search Engine Optimization is all about: gaining a position as close to #1 as possible and then staying there on top, and to achieve maximum exposure.

* It’s all about location

For those who own businesses, then the primary name of the game is profits. Revenue of course, comes from people who spend their incomes with you. The more people spend their money with you, the richer and more successful you become.

In today’s business environment, it is all about LOCATION, and the next important word that comes is “ADVERTISE”.

The way the worldwide web works is the same as in the world of advertising or the directories: It’s about location in the search engines and directory systems, and advertising. If your listing is something less than the top 100, you stand an excellent chance of never being seen, or viewed. Most people are notoriously impatient, and they do not wish to wade through tons of listings. This simply means that you really need to be near, or on the top of the lists for the key words that you feel your prospective customers are, or will be using to find you.

* How Search Engine Optimizers Do This

Improving your position on the web could be done through a wide variety of methods. An easy way for this is to hire a professional Search Engine Optimization firm that can do the job for you. You could check their fees and price ranges on the web or the phone book. The process is definitely a labor-intensive one, and definitely doesn’t come cheap.

But anyway, you too can do it yourself. All you need to do is to get the rules for listing within each of the engines and directory systems where you wish to be listed, the register with them. If they allow you to point to secondary pages that also discuss specific topics, then be sure to do that by pointing to the pages within your site that cover that topic. You may also need to check on your position every month within each of the engines and directories to see how you are stacking up, and sometimes you may need to modify your site to improve your position, as well as your exposure.

I Got To No. 1 on Google At No Cost

by: Ralph Morton

After many years of buying into everything in sight I finally got the message.

For years I have been told, get a list, well I tried and failed miserably. Seemed I got a few and as fast as I got them they disappeared. Many of you know what I mean.

Then someone did me a favor I was told to write articles and get sites linking to mine. I didn’t think much of that idea as I thought I had no talent for writing.

However after 3 years or so with no results I was desperate.

Well, 10 weeks ago I decided I would give it a go.

Didn't think I could do it, but I wrote one article about Toxins, then I wrote another and another, to date I have 20. Even though I say it myself, they are not too bad.

I next sent the Articles to 150 directories manually. I know there is software out there that works great, unfortunately it never worked for me.

Anyway, as can imagine it was a lot of work. I kept at it, and I found most of the directories linked back to my site and I began to get hits.

By the way I did this without spending one red cent. I had made a decision that no money would be spent for anything. During the years I had spent enough. I wanted to prove it could be done without spending.

I guess I could have put this together as an ebook and charged the usual $47.00 for it, that seems to be the regular number. I decided against that, as I had made a vow I would not spend any more money, and I didn’t want others to spend.

It is quite an achievement to get to No 1 on Google and spending nothing. Oh, that’s a lie, I did spend $1.50 on a Article submitter on eBay, unfortunately it didn’t work. That is something I should mention here, these Article submitters are available for $47.00 (there’s that number again) all over the internet, however you can get them for $1.50 on eBay. The guy told me the one I bought from him worked on his computer, so it could be a good deal.

You really need a submitter for it is a lot of work, believe me.

After you have sent all your articles to the directories, you receive links back to your site, as you well know linking is one of the most important factors to get your site listed high on the search engines.

The 100 or so links coming back to my site from the articles were not enough to do the full job, so I had to come up with a software to do the job for me. Free of course….

I found http://www.linkshighway.net/main/ . This did a great job for me, easy to use, it got 70 extra links in the matter of a couple of hours. Really it is easy as pie. I get more than that, I had 14 requests to link to me, yesterday so it continually builds.

Then I saw somewhere, the more links to your site the better, these guys were talking in thousands. Iv’e still some work to do.

As I said, about 4 weeks ago I started to get hits to my site and I have kept records of them, as I wanted to see how they grew.

Once again it was easy going, simple. I now had 20 articles out there to 150 directories and had 200 sites linking back to my site. Now the next thing was to have a web site that was friendly to the search engines.

I will continue with this posting in a couple of days as I have something that really is pressing.

Before I leave I have to show you this, here are the results of the last few keywords that are truly working, I will give you the reason in a couple days why they work.

ISAGENIX home business... 4th out of 366,000
Hong Kong 3rd out of 24,600
are you sure it works 1st out of 42,800
Natural Cleanse 1st out of 86,500
facts 2nd out of 29,200
join our team 1st out of 43,900
liver cleanse 3rd out of 15,900
Leader 3rd out of 38,700
proof 1st out of 16,900
cleanse 6th out of 104,000
Colon Cleanse 5th out of 37,900
Natural colon cleanse 4th out of 22,600
Work at home 4th out of 218,000
Isagenix 29th out of 695,000
How to use the 9 day plan 2nd out of 37,000

I built my web site keyword sensitive to the word Isagenix as that is the program I am in. Before each keyword I placed the word Isagenix, Viz. Isagenix Hong Kong.

Good Design Practices and Important Rules in Website Design

by: Kanicen Nichathavan

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Your website is where your business resides it's like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.