Search Engine Optimization

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Are YOU Ready to Climb Your Way Up The Search Engine Rankings and Start Getting the FREE Traffic You’re Looking For? Hundreds of places claim they can give you top rankings but wouldn’t you rather just learn how to do it on your own so you can repeat the process on any future site you build? Here is what you will learn inside this guide. What in the world is link structure, and how can it help your site? In this chapter, you’ll learn some simple, yet important facto… More >>

“101 Basics To Search Engine Optimization” – Tried and Tested Methods Revealed!

Search engine optimisation is currently becoming a very lucrative industry for those who have the skills to carry out optimisation effectively. Put simply, the process involves maximising the traffic that goes to a website from search engine channels. This maximising of traffic increases a websites ranking in the eyes of the search engine and hence makes you a more popular choice by users who are more likely to choose sites at the top of the list of results.

The factors you must consider when undertaking search engine optimisation are; the keywords that you use, for instance these are the words that are most likely to be entered into a search engine when looking for your type of product. The title of your page is important as this is the first thing the search engine reads of your site, hence relevance is extremely important.

The description of your site is the second piece of information a search engine reads and once again has to be relevant. The text on your site is also important in terms of relevance and worth for a search engine to rank it highly. Links to your site from other sites will also help increase the popularity of your site.

When in the process of search engine optimisation selecting your keywords carefully is imperative. Obviously you must find keywords that people are likely to type into search engines. These keywords must be placed within the page to achieve high rankings; it is worth remembering however that phrases rather than single words make for better search engine optimisation. This is because more people tend to search using phrases rather than single words. These keywords should be included on all of the pages and it may even be worth including misspellings if these words are hard to spell.

It is also worth including these keywords and phrases in the title tag, the majority of search engines place high regard on the titles as these are the first piece of information they read when calculating rankings. The most important keywords should be included on the tags on your homepage while internal pages should have the less popular search terms in place. The title for each page should also be unique as most search engine spiders will place importance on the unique information on each site.

The description once again should include keywords in an easily readable sentence. As human users rather than spiders will read this information making it legible is important to increase traffic. The same can be said for content, while spiders will pick up on content, it is the human user who will find the content most useful. This content should be truly unique and well written as duplication is a big mistake when undertaking optimisation. A minimum of two hundred words per page is a helpful guideline to follow as the amount of content on a site is also important.

Linking from other sites is of vital importance and will increase your search engine rankings. This form of optimisation will help in two ways, while it increases your rankings and relative popularity as a site, it should also increase traffic through these links. A blog can also help increase the popularity of your site.

Some methods of optimisation and website design will however harm your rankings. These include placing complicated Flash displays and dynamic URLs that make your site harder to read for search engine spiders. Also by including keywords in your tags that have no relation to the information present will also harm your rankings by disregarding relevance principles.

Search engine optimisation is a complicated process and this article has just scratched the surface of the methods used in the industry. By pursuing these strategies you are optimising in an ethical or ‘white hat’ way, at all costs you should avoid following strategies of ‘black hat’ SEO. ‘Black hat’ methods will ultimately harm your rankings as search engines pick up on the unscrupulous methods employed. It is always worth employing an SEO company that will pursue ethical forms of optimisation for true rankings and increased traffic over an extended period of time.

In the world of search engine optimisation there are generally two schools of thought on the methods and techniques that should be utilised to raise a website in search engine rankings. Of these two schools there is ‘black hat’ optimisation that can be described as unethical and pursues a course of action that works towards hoodwinking the search engine mechanisms into raising a sites’ profile. By using black hat optimisation methods however you will in fact harm your rankings in the long run, more advisable is the ethical route.

The history of black hat optimisation started around a decade ago when the search engine mechanisms, or algorithms were not yet developed entirely. Like most things in life if there is a way to cheat the system many will try. In these early stages the search engine algorithms were manipulated. This was especially true in the ‘adult’ industries where black hat optimisation was employed extensively to raise specific sites’ rankings. But how has black hat developed? What methods of optimisation are still considered unethical in the eyes of a search engine?

First and foremost a commonly used method has been keyword stuffing. Put literally this is the process of filling a webpage with lists of keywords that attempt to make a website more relevant in the eyes of search engines. Google especially has worked to remove the effects of this method by searching for true text rather than lists of bad prose that simply contain the right words. If a search engine does find you guilty of using such methods, penalties will undoubtedly follow.

Another method of black hat methods is the process of cloaking that utilises a hidden webpage that is only visible to search engine spiders. In combination to this hidden page that is only visible to the spiders there is an accompanying webpage that is viewed by human users. Once again this form of optimisation is seriously frowned upon in the SEO world.

In combination with keyword stuffing is the process of using invisible text, or mosaic cloaking. This is the process of making text boxes full of keywords, usually using a font colour that matches the background and hence invisible to the human user while remaining visible to spiders.

Another way of optimising a website unethically is to create a doorway page. Put simply this is a page that has undergone a process of optimisation and subsequently has great search engine rankings. The problem however is that this page has no real content and is purely used to link to another less highly ranked page. In conjunction with these doorway pages are spam pages that perform much the same purpose but instead are full of adverts that make money from each click; fundamentally these are detrimental to the quality of the internet.

Interlinking is another method of black hat optimisation that creates many websites and simultaneously links them all together to improve the back links to a site. This can be fruitful for improved rankings but once again will eventually harm rankings once search engine regulators pick up on it.

Finally there are two techniques that have been developed to combat the ever more advanced search engine algorithms. One of these is selling page rank, a process that simply involves selling links from a highly rankled page to a lower one. The other is buying expired domain names of sites that originally had good rankings and keeping the high number of links related to the site.

These methods are seriously unethical in the optimisation industry although unfortunately still employed by some unscrupulous operators. The crux of the issue is that they actively work to reduce the relevance of search engine results and subsequently are frowned upon.

There are operators out there who follow ethical methods and instead of trying to manipulate the algorithms use them to their advantage; this has been broadly labelled as search engine compliance. By studying the SEO methods that are being utilised on your behalf it is possible to identify the black hatters and instead use a white hat or ethical SEO specialist.