Search Engine Optimization - Give Yourself A Lift

Search Engine Optimization - Give Yourself A Lift
Each search engine operates a complex algorithm - a huge formula - that takes into account dozens, or perhaps even hundreds of factors. Ever since search engines began website builders have been trying to work out which of the myriad factors are important and which can be safely ignored. That endless quest is what search engine optimization is all about. Every once in a while someone manages to reverse engineer Google or one of the others enough to find that one, two, or a combination of several factors are currently flavor of the month. When they find this golden information, websites spring up everywhere that try to exploit the new SEO knowledge to trick Google into giving them top rankings. It is big business because high rankings directly equate to high traffic - free traffic at that - that can then be turned into cash. Google and the other search engines tend to show 10 listings by default after someone performs a search, and most people only bother to look down the first page they see. it is a tribute to the effectiveness of the search engines that most searchers are satisfied by the results they get from the page #1 search results, but that does mean that if your site is ranked at #11 it will get significantly less traffic than if it was at #10. In fact, the number of people who click through the listings diminishes very quickly as you move down the rank. On my 22-inch monitor, on pages where Google puts three paid ads on top of the natural organic search results, I can only see four listings without scrolling the screen. This small 'window' is called the 'above the fold' area of the page and accounts for two-thirds of all click traffic. In addition, when you factor in Google's own statement that as many as 14% of their clicks are on paid ads and 86% of clicks are on organic search results, you begin to see why search engine optimization - and its endless drive to get your site into the top three or four of Google's listings for a given keyword or phrase - is so important. Search engine optimization breaks down into two quite distinct area: on-page and off-page optimization. With on-page SEO the aim is to make your web page as attractive to the search engines as possible for a many factors that seem to matter. These factors tend to be ones that lend a web page authority and credence and are not generally too much concerned with the look and feel of the site. Nobody knows for sure which factors are important at any one time, and the search engines are certainly not going to tell us, but some elements of a page seem to count more than others: For example, all the following elements should be present and should include the page' principle keyword: The title tag of the page The URL of the page The page's primary headline (as indicated in the HTML by the H1 tag) The age of the domain the page is on, and the length of time the domain name has been registered for appear to matter. In addition, the way the page content has been written seems to count more nowadays than it has in the past. For example, a page that is primarily about horse training should include natural-sounding words that complement that keyword - words like stable, rider, vet and so on. This is called latent semantic analysis (which means finding the hidden words that count). For a keyword that has little competition - few other web pages trying to get ranked for it - good on-page SEO can often be all you need to get a good ranking. However, in the real world most of the keywords we want to build pages, and get traffic for do have competition, and sometimes there are hundreds of thousands of other sites vying for top ranks. That's when the other side of search engine optimization becomes so very important: off-page SEO. As the name suggests, off-page search engine optimization is about doing things to attract the search engines' attention to your site, on other people's sites. To understand how it works we have to go right back to the beginning of search engines and see what made it all happen for the guys who started Google in March 1996. Their breakthrough was to realize that if web page A on one site had a link on it to web page B on another site, that link could be taken as a vote of confidence. So the more links that a page had pointing at it from other sites, the more of an authority that page, and therefore the site it is a part of could be assumed to have. These links, now called backlinks, are still the fundamental factor that drives off page search engine optimization: the more backlinks you can get - and the more 'authority' the pages giving you those backlinks - the higher your pages are regarded. Building networks of backlinks to your pages is hard work and many people fail to recognize that without it, their sites, and their traffic, can never reach full potential.
There is a huge amount of information available on line but to better your chances of succeeding it's a good idea to join a teaching program, that way you are more likely to follow a step by step proceedure, rather than engage in dozens of hit and miss attempts.
Margy Long is a tutor from one of the world's largest internet marketing & mentoring programs. For more information on how you can either create an online home business or transform an existing one into a thriving and profitable experience, please go here to see more great information
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