What is SEO, PPC & Ranking?
Copyright 2007 Bill Naugle
This article examines the basics behind quality site promotion.
Let us take a good look at acronyms in the industry! Search Engine
Optimization (SEO), is a term thrown around a million times a day
online. So many sites use old techniques that will get there
rankings hurt or reversed with there hap-hazard web designs it
frustrates me. I don’t want you to be one of them. In fact this
article is aimed for creating SEEN web design projects. If you don’t
use this anti-SEO (i.e. cloaking and doorway pages) and follow the
following rules you can expect decent results with your web design.
The basics for SEO are simple and should be used by all web
designers and web design services (although that doesn’t mean they
are always used):
1. Optimize your site with a high
percentage of text relevant to the search terms you intend to go
after.
2. Make sure all alt (alternate image tags) and title
tags have relative descriptions including keywords.
3. Make
sure your site meets current online standards and can be equally
viewed among all browsers and operating machines. Even though some
pages may still display correctly with incorrect HTML, it can hinder
the way search engines will look at them, bringing the overall
optimization of the page down.
4. Make sure all pages are
under 800K (recommended for fast loading pages).
5. Submit
(manually, by hand) to all major search engines, an automatically to
lesser engines through (at least) a free search engine submission
service or program.
Keeping these five rules in mind will
help, however a serious look at other aspects will help even more in
SEO. I will go into these aspects in more detail with articles to
come at websiterankingtop.com but this is a good start.
PPC,
otherwise known as Pay Per Click advertising is found on numerous
search engines and smaller ones alike. The two major players are
Google and Overture (now own by Yahoo), however there are some other
PPC engines that use a multiple of lesser engines and quality
websites to offer there services. Some will give you a top ten
ranking within your keyword searches while others have you bid for
placement among there engines. A few simple rules to follow:
1. The content of your site must match the keywords bid on.
2. SELL! SELL! SELL! While traditional SEO focuses on how the search
engines will view your page, this is your chance to engage the human
customer! Traditional sales techniques work best here.
3.
Will visits to your web pages convert into quality leads or actual
sales? Make sure the cost of bidding will be recovered, plus some.
4. The more popular the search terms = the more expensive it will
be. Keep this in mind and target populated terms with financial
efficiency.
5. All of your keywords stand no chance
What'soever of being listed in the top ten positions on the major
search engines. Organic top ten placements can be very expensive so
this is your chance of competing with terms you don’t rank well
with.
Make sure to have a relevant page for your search term.
This is critical as we all know from browsing; if a site doesn’t fit
the bill in the first three seconds we are more than happy to click
that back button.
SEM = Structural Equation Modeling? NOPE!
SEM = Search Engine Marketing? NOPE! SEM = Standard Error of Mean?
Nope! While all of these are acronyms for SEM, there not the ones we
care to discuss here in our brief overview of Search Engine
Mechanics. Anything I say in this column may be outdated with the
next big search engine “patch” so what I mean by SEM is simple: Keep
Up! That’s right, by simply going by what you know, or an article
written 8 months ago you will get lost or penalized in your attempts
for effective online marketing. Search Engine mechanics is the
mathematical art behind the algorithms of the popular, well
producing engine online. To find out that a “Jagger Update”
relinquishes all reciprocal links to your website in the eyes of the
75%+ that currently engage Google is huge. The mechanics of the
currently used search engines is something to keep your eye on.
While HTML doesn’t change much each year (comparatively), search
engines do. Simply put: make sure you know what to do to get ranked
in this ever evolving market!
-One last note: make sure you
know what pages are visited and where users are spending there time.
If you have a well visited page (found through your web stats) that
isn’t receiving much time spent: GUESS WHERE YOU NEED A REWRITE!
This is meant to be, and should be a good start to all wanting high
search engine ranking within there web design realm.
Websiterankingtop.com Bill Naugle
Bill Naugle has been
writing articles, press releases and ebooks to help Webmasters
achieve success in search engine rankings. He has written on many
subjects. He started writing on the internet in 2001.
http://www.websiterankingtop.com/
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