SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

Although Overture (now owned by Yahoo) can be used by itself, its often better to use it together with another PPC engine, to get the best chance of being seen. Overture is the largest of the PPC engines so it is a great place to start if youre going to try making money by spending money, but make sure that you dont try to provide your visitor with too much too quickly. It is very easy to over diversify your online advertisement portfolio and, in effect, pull yourself out of the game with a strained wallet.

Overture does nothing to hide the prices of its advertising from you theyre straightforward from the beginning. This is a great advantage for users of Overture, as you can never spend more than you want to. You know exactly where your ads will show up, and you can change them as often as you want. The ideology behind Overtures open display of its prices is that an informed customer is the best kind of customer. You never run into customers who complain about what they got because you tell them what they get. This is the kind of attitude that more online utilities and web sites should adapt. It gives web users a fair shake at optimizing the return on their financial investments.

You can include prices and other details in your listing so that people are better informed before they click this saves you money on people who click and turn out not to be interested. After all, you dont drop the big bucks just to watch your hits climb. You pay for quality hits that will result in sales or whatever else you are trying to deliver via your web page. Make sure to only pay for key words that are going to deliver quality traffic with sales potential. You should write a different ad for every keyword youre targeting, taking the time to do it correctly. Use the keyword in the ad, as Yahoo will put it in bold to make it stand out, and more people will click on your ad.

Remember that one of the biggest reasons that you are probably using Overture is that it is so outspoken with its prices. If you are selling something, why not put the price right out there in the advertisement? This is a quick way to avoid getting hits from those users that are seeking free versions of whatever you are selling. Believe me, no matter what you are selling, somebody is trying to get it for free.

Since using Overture gives you more flexibility and room when it comes to writing ads, youll be able to do more with them. Other sites you typically give you a standard 3-line ad area and no more, which doesnt leave much room for creativity. In the case of Overture you can generate spectacular ads that really give you a chance at displaying your product as something that the user would want to buy before they even click on the link.

One thing to remember when you create an advertisement is to state the most important things first, in case some of the ad gets cut off or the reader gets bored before they finish.

When youre one of the top 5 bidders for a keyword at Overture, you get a little bonus. Yahoo will list you twice when you have one of the top five positions once at the side of the page, and once at the bottom. If youre not in the top 5, youre missing out on this free exposure so its much better to pay a little extra to become #5 than to stay as #6.

Check your advertisements at least weekly, making sure youre still where you want to be relative to your competitors. Change the ads every time you launch a new product or service, and dont be afraid to try out new keywords you think of.

Be creative, and create short-term Overture ads for special offers if youre offering free shipping or free gifts for a limited time, say so! Use your ads to promote, advertise, and sell. After all, sales are what youre paying for, right? Many people are unaware that Overture lets you do this, so its a chance to stand out.

MSN may be the most complete search engine out there. It seems to me that every web site that I look at in order to find the number of pages that it has listed has the following fallout: MSN has the most results, Google comes in second, Yahoo! comes last. Other search engines will generally fall somewhere between Google and Yahoo! This is a result of some very extensive work by the team and MSN. The beautiful thing about MSN is that you can find results for just about everything. If you cant find it at Google, cant find it at Yahoo! head on over to MSN and youll find something even if it is nothing more than a forum posting.

Its still quite easy to figure out what you need to do to your site to rank highly at MSN. MSN generally indexes every page that it can find anyway and is a pretty handy search engine in that it is the third most popular out there and it is also a nice one to foreshadow what may be happening to your listings at Google in the not too distant future. Theyve recently changed their algorithm, though, and everyone wants to know how it works. Well, here are some answers.

MSNs ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as page content, the number and quality of the sites that link to your pages, and the site content, and keyword relevance. Keep in mind that there are lots of differences between MSN and Yahoo and Google. All search engine algorithms are similar, but little differences can have big effects when it comes to SEO. The nice thing about MSN is that its algorithm isnt as strict as those of Yahoo! and Google and is therefore a very powerful SEO tool in and of itself.

Relevant themes and topics are very important to MSN optimization, and you should also consider keyword density remember, no keyword stuffing, as MSN explicitly says this is against their rules. The general rule is that you should make sure that there are key words in your title and then follow the basic platform for key words. Put a few in a header at the top of your page; scatter a few throughout the page including several in the first and last paragraphs; finally, put a couple of links that contain key words towards the bottom of your page. These steps are common for all search engine optimizations and should be a set process for every page that you attempt to optimize. Complete this work before attempting any other SEO procedures as this is the basis of SEO.

Links are important, and maintaining good incoming links with your keywords will get you good rankings. Its very important to get as many natural links as possible providing interesting and useful content can make this happen for you with no extra work at all! Youll seem completely natural to MSNs spider. These natural links are the basis of link SEO. If you are trying to attain links you should first attempt to attain these links from pages that would naturally link to you but may not have heard of your site yet. After you have done this you should go to directories and other sources of links that may not be as obvious. First things first, dont mess up your search engine listings because of a bunch of bogus links from unsuitable, questionable, or malicious locations. These links can and will get you banned.

MSN doesnt allow you to pay to boost your sites ranking, but they do offer advertising. This advertising will allow you to pay a certain amount for links in their sponsored links boxes on the top and sides of each results page. The value of these links depends on the demand for them. At any particular time a sponsored link could become very expensive by somebody bidding an outrageous amount for a link, or by a large number of people trying to overwhelm a niche market.

MSN doesnt update often, but when it does it often removes links it believes to be out of date, so make sure you change your site occasionally.

One thing that MSN likes a lot is well-formed HTML code, with closed, valid tags. Watch out for broken links, and make sure you have static URLs that dont move around, and contain your keywords.

Google is still the most popular search engine out there, and theyre not showing any signs of slowing down. Its important to know how to get on the right track with your SEO for Google. It is also important, however, to remember that Google is not the only search engine out there and that Yahoo! is also a highly rated search engine which actually has more pop culture usage.

Before you can truly understand Google you must understand a little bit of the history behind Google. In the beginning, Google was considered by many to be the Geeks Search Engine. This changed as Google started delivering better and better results. Google slowly evolved into the most trusted search engine around, but Yahoo!s advertising strength and popular usage has still claimed a large number of users. It wasnt all that long ago when Yahoo! was the most popular search engine by far.

Googles search engine is based on PageRank, a complex algorithm that was revolutionary when it was invented. This page rank is the primary reason that Google is so popular. The Page Ranking technology that Google has created and the evolutionary steps that Google has taken to increase the strength of its algorithm has made it a search engine giant which actually sets out to protect internet users from fraudulent web sites. Google has come to be a search engine that cannot really be tricked. Its kind of the integrity police f the world wide web. Basically, Google checks the number of links to each site in its database, and treats them as votes. Here are some tips on getting ranked high on Google:

1.The more incoming links you have, the better your chances are. Good links are ones that are relevant to your own page and link with text that makes it obvious that they intended to link to your site. Google has also recently integrated a new piece into its algorithm which makes old links better than new links. In Googles opinion, if a link withstands the test of time it is has to be relevant or else both parties would have removed the link after not seeing any positive action by Google. Basically, this is another one of Googles keeper of integrity options that have become so famous among SEOs.

2. Links from authority sites, such as directories or non-profit organizations, tend to produce better results than links from commercial sites. Google likes to decide what sites are important. A site has some huge credential for being a spectacular source for quality information will be appreciated more than sites that dont have such strong affiliations with quality work and content. This will result in stronger, more heavily weighted links to and from this site.

3. Site elements to consider for Google are the title (including the strongest keyword phrase), the meta description (Google displays this to its users) and the body text (it needs to be highly-focused and use keywords well), as well as your onsite navigation.

4. Make sure that Google can spider the whole site easily. Youll probably want to have plain links to every page on your site at the bottom of each of your pages.

Dont forget, though, that Google is strict about cheaters who use unethical SEO techniques. Here are some things that Google hates:

1. Getting lots of shadow domains that all point to one site.

2. Using doorway pages.

3. Using falsified WHOIS information.

4. Sites that are “fake” search engines or spyware.

Google Facts and Fiction.

Google has an article on its site called Google Facts and Fiction. For example:

Fiction: Advertising on Google affects my rankings in the search results.

Fact: Advertising with Google neither helps (nor hurts!) a site’s rankings on Google.

Fiction: Sites that are not HTML are not included in Google’s index

Fact: Google is and does index as many file formats as possible, however there are some that it cannot index. File types Google is able index include: pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf.

Everyone who wants to optimize for Google should make sure they read this article, to avoid common mistakes.

Is your website is dynamic? You need to be careful, or you might not do well in the search engines. Some spider handle dynamic URLs quite well, but others have trouble and even those that do spider them might not look very deep within your site. The problem lies in the fact that you cannot really predict what will be delivered in these URLs at all times. If you have an inkling of what is going to happen to URLs most often plan ahead; try to insure that you do not run into problems regarding these URLs.

Dynamic web pages are usually database driven and displayed on-the-fly. You can recognize by looking for symbols like question marks and ampersands in the URL. These on-the-fly web pages are hard to deal with because they very every time that they are delivered. The best way to conquer this problem is to run everything that you can through the URL rather than through post method or through sessions/cookies.

If you want to sell one or two products, then you only need a static website with one or two pages. If you have a database with hundreds of products, however, then it would be very time-consuming to make each page manually thats when most people build a dynamic website.

These dynamic web sites should be organized in such a way that every page that has the potential to become dynamic can be delivered in a static form as well. I.E. your product listings pages may display certain categories dynamically, but they should have static links that will simply display every product. You should also have distinct links to each category as most search engines can handle a dynamic URL as long as it doesnt change each time that the site is viewed.

There are programs that will automatically produce static pages from a database, but its not usually the best move. Most designers to work with true dynamic technologies such as PHP, because of the amount of time it saves. Because search engine technology is increasing, the problems associated with dynamic URLs are decreasing day by day. It is still important to have constants, but you dont necessarily have to have a huge list of static links throughout your site.

It can be much easier to put www.domain.com/article.php?num=1 than www.domain.com/articles/article1.html. A search engine can easily locate the prior so there is no real need for the latter. The only time that you will see trouble is if you have things like www.domain.com/article?num=1&userid=2424 where userid changes for each user. If this sort of thing happens you may run into trouble and should arrange so that the userid isnt completely necessary (unless, of course, you want the page password protected).

Dynamic websites arent usually engine friendly, though, unless you deliberately make them that way. If youve spent money and time to build a dynamic website then you wont want to throw it out you need to learn how to optimize it for the search engines.

So how can you keep the functionality of your dynamic website, and make it search engine friendly at the same time? Well, suppose you have a website with products, and instead of having each product on one page youre using a dynamic, searchable database. Searching returns a list of products that meet the search criteria, and maybe a small picture clicking the picture shows the user more information about the product.

You have to realize that search engines cant use your search box, so the only way for them to access your dynamic information is if they follow a link to it some other way. The lesson to learn is that you need to give access to all your pages with plain, text links, somehow you cant just rely on searches to drive your whole site.

What this means is that somewhere on your website you need to have a list of your products that has been organized by category from here, you should be able to follow links to every page in your database. Once youve done this, the search engines can see your content.

Offering both search and category views improves your sites navigation, as well as making it crawlable your work will be useful to your visitors as well as the search engines, which is what SEO is all about.

DMOZ is the directory where Google starts when it crawls the web, so getting listed in DMOZ is good for you. SEO with DMOZ starts with selecting the search terms youre targeting, and then finding a directory category that includes them. This can be a time-consuming and difficult task. Youll often find lots of matching categories. The trick is to find the most precise category and, if possible, a directory that does not have too many other competitors in it. You can hit a niche market simply by being placed in a category that has few competitors. DMOZ, of course, makes the final decision as to where your website will be located.

Dont choose a category thats too general for your site, as it might just get removed later on. Make your site stand out by using a unique, catchy description one for people, not search engines. Remember, you will probably get a pretty hefty number of hits from DMOZ itself. When you are trying to get listed in DMOZ, dont worry about trying to get a nice listing in the search engines that crawl here, worry about getting a good listing here. The search engines care more about where DMOZ lists your site than what you have to say about your site in your description; DMOZ cares more about how accurately described, how interesting, and how often visited your site is than where you are listed in the search engines.

A third feature to be aware of is the PageRank of the category, and the number of listings on the page. Youll do better with more specific, smaller categories, especially if they have dedicated editors. A small category with a high page rank is the best situation that you can run into. Remember that a pages page rank is split between the number of links that go out from it so if you run into a page with a rank of seven with seventy-five out links you probably arent as well off as a page with a ranking of five and ten out links. This is a constant for Google Page Ranks, not an exception for DMOZ. Your targeted keywords should appear in your sites description, towards the beginning. Dont put them towards the end, as the editor might chop them off to save space!

Remember that once a site is submitted to DMOZ, its very difficult to update its description. Give it a few days to think it over before you submit it, and be more vague about websites if you think they might change. Dont write descriptions that could become out of date easily. If you are running a monthly special you shouldnt include this in your description unless you say something to the extent of low price sales monthly. If you suddenly decide that you are going to completely transform your site into something completely different you will have huge problems with your listings. Keep this in mind before you start building your site if there are possibilities that you will choose to reuse the domain that you have purchased.

If you absolutely have to resubmit, you can submit a blank form that informs the editor of your former web site that your site has changed drastically and that you want the old listing deleted. From there you can submit a new form to any category (or categories) that you need to be listed on with an updated title, description, and key words.

Multiple Listings for the Same Site.

Some editors allow multiple listings for submitted sites, especially if theyre good quality sites that span multiple DMOZ categories. Its always best to request multiple listings you can use the text box on the submission page to justify yourself.

If you find a good category for a niche inform the editor as to whether or not this will be a specified category and then search for any other categories that are related. You may get a good deal of hits from your niche, but it may also be a small market for a reason. If there arent that many people who would be utilizing that particular category, you may want to submit to other categories that will provide you with more substantial results.

Being Patient.

Follow the submission guidelines and dont exaggerate. If no-one seems to be reviewing your site after a week or so has gone by then you could post a question. Be patient, though: most of the DMOZ directory is edited by hand, and theyre very busy. In many cases it can take as long as three months to get added.

DMOZ simply wasnt prepared for the sudden importance it had forced upon it. One of the biggest problems with the directory is that each site must be looked at by editors, so your site might not get indexed for no reason other than the editor not liking it, or even just losing it.

There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you dont know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they arent getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you dont have much reason to keep a link if you arent getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure its still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someones site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your sites content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says Disallow and has the URL of their links page, then theyre not letting spiders index that page. Dont exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being cloaked, and report it to the search engines if it is. You dont want to get involved with these people better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesnt necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldnt be more than 20 links if the site breaks this rule, dont even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking theyre helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them dont even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. Theres no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

Uneducated customers usually expect unrealistic results when it comes to SEO. This is mostly caused by some so-called optimizers who promise things that just arent possible. When it comes to SEO, you should always do your research before you hand over any money. This applies to every aspect of your business as do most SEO related techniques. It is always important to keep in mind that your SEO work is no more or less than another business expense. You should never fork over money until you have done your research and ensured that you will be provided with a quality product.

Basically, there are only a few choices when it comes to getting search engine traffic. You can use pay per click ads, or submit your site to the search engines and hope you get a good ranking. Instead of hiring some overpriced company who know nothing about optimizing your site, you should keep control of your site and save money by doing the SEO yourself. Another great resource is to find a site that you would like to post your ads and pay them for a static link.

These links are very powerful because they will increase your google page rank since they are permanent. They are dually useful because you know where the traffic is coming from and you know that you are getting traffic from a site that is related to your own.

Legitimate companies wont try to hide anything if a companys WHOIS information looks suspicious, then buyer beware. Any legit SEO specialist or company will give you more for nothing than they make you pay for, to show that theyre serious and they can deliver on their promises.

Basically, theres no shortage of websites that promise to get your site to that number one position in the rankings. The biggest problem is that all of these scam search engine marketing companies use recycled information (the same information anyone can get from the web). Worse, many of them use outdated information, or information thats just plain wrong. There are too many inexperienced people out there trying to make a buck, without having any knowledge.

The truth is that no one can guarantee the number one position they can try to get your site there, but its rare for anyone to even be able to guarantee you the top 10 nowadays. In many cases you have just as much chance of getting yourself into a top 10 position as any of these companies do. Any person or company that guarantees you a number position is just out to take your money: beware of these people! Theyre out there and you might not even realize what youre dealing with at first, as they do a good job of pretending to be knowledgeable about SEO.

Not only do you have to be careful of the unscrupulous companies doing SEO, but you also you need to be careful of some of the companies trying to sell you SEO tools. Apart from being a waste of your money, some tools can actually damage to your site’s rankings. Theres plenty of software that is honestly helpful but there are still problem cases, especially with search engine submission software. Many search engines and directories wont accept a site that is submitted through one of these programs.

Unfortunately, the Web has more than its fair share of fast-talking con-artists ready to separate naive people from their hard-earned money.

If you do outsource search engine marketing, make sure you find a real, specialized search engine marketing firm to do the work for you. You need to be certain that youre using a trustworthy firm with a first-rate track record — check them out and see who theyre working with currently. Knowing something about the subject helps you to ask questions and make the right decision.

Do-it-yourself marketing is still the best way, if you can put in the time and effort to complete it. It can be time consuming in the beginning, and if you dont have the two or so hours a week it takes then you should consider hiring someone to do it for you. Search engines are a great way of finding out more about SEO learn as much as you can before you get started and youll do much better than the people who didnt bother.

There are two major search engine marketing strategies in use today: SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click). These two methods are very different, and deciding which one is right for you can be hard. Which one do you think will do more for your website? Well, that all depends on what your websites like.

One leading contributor to the difficulty in deciding which is correct for your site is that you dont really understand why you cant just use both. There is no real reason that you cannot implement both methods when marketing your site, in fact, I encourage this behavior as PPC can be integrated quite nicely into an SEO plan.

PPC is a good way to get users to become more familiar with your site. Once they are used to seeing your site, they will probably begin to stick around if they encounter it in a search engine. The more often that your site is visited the more that search engines will like it. This is one reason that it is so crucial to attempt to get as many quality hits as possible.

Reading up on the pros and cons of each program lets you sit down and decide in your own time which strategy would work best for your website. Since search engine marketing is undoubtedly the best source of targeted traffic out there at the moment, as people will continue to battle for the top search engine positions, even from day to day.

As people continually try to find new and unique ways to being additional traffic to their websites, the SEO industry continues to grow. PPC refers to text-based advertising on a search engine, and you will be charged by the click whenever a visitor clicks on one of your ads. These order of ads is usually based on bidding prices, meaning that the advertiser who bids the highest price per click will be listed first. Weve all heard of sponsored listings, right? Well, thats what they are: PPC listings.

SEO tries to change your search ranking by looking at a number of factors, including link popularity, PageRank, and so on. Rankings you get through SEO will appear on the main, natural search results pages, not over in the box with the sponsored links. And you dont have to pay for your clicks!

So, how can we tell which method is better? You cant say that one method will always be better, because they serve different purposes. However, one is likely to be a better fit with your business than the others.

PPC.

PPC traffic, rankings and results tend to be more stable and predictable than SEO, and, combined with its low cost, this makes PPC one of the more popular ways of advertising. Most companies try PPC before they try SEO, because its seen as more stable and respectable.

In many cases PPC lets you rank high on the search engines, without having to do the tedious work involved in SEO no finding link partners, posting links, and so on. As long as you have the budget for it, the rankings yours, and another advantage is that the listing will get posted when you add it, not when the search engine gets round to it.

Sadly, PPCs popularity makes it a competitive market. You will find that CPCs (costs per click) are steadily rising, and that hurts the little guys. Prices work as auctions the more people in the auctions, the higher the prices.

SEO.

The main benefit of SEO is that it can be done entirely for free, and lets face it, who doesn’t like free traffic?

The disadvantages, though, are that your traffic is unpredictable. You have to guess, adapt, and constantly change strategies. One month you could just fall out of the top 10 without any warning, and there goes your income. SEO is also slower than PPC, as the search engines only update their natural listings about once a month.

So what should you choose? Well, it depends on how much money you have to spend. If you have cash then PPC should be your first choice, as it produces faster results. If youre on a low budget, you should look at SEO first. The best thing to do, though, is to use both techniques together use PPC for some keywords and SEO for others, depending on the keywords price.

For as long as SEO has been in existence, there have been all sorts of myths about it, and the situation isnt helped by the number of so-called experts spreading them. Heres a list of the biggest SEO myths:

You cant optimize perfectly for every site

There are 10,000 search engines out there

PageRank is dead

Your should repeat your keywords 100 times on each page

Search engines dont have time to ban you for bad SEO

You should submit your site to every search engine going

You dont need content to get ranked high

Meta tags are very important

All you need is more links

SEO doesnt require patience

New sites cant get listed in search engines

You should have multiple domain names

Its good to resubmit every week or every month

If you find companies that tell you any of these things, then you should run away as fast as you can. Dont pay attention to the myths of SEO the only techniques you should be using are ones that are proven to increase your websites ranking.

There are a lot of unethical, unprofessional business practices in the optimization industry, and you need to make sure you have enough facts on your side to compare the services youre being offered. To have a good SEO campaign, you cant fall victim to the kind of big promises that are always un-promised in the small print. Dont throw away your money: invest it properly in good marketing, advertising, and content.

When inexperienced and unprofessional optimizers scam uneducated SEO customers, it gives everyone who works in the field a bad name. If anyone tells you that its OK to keyword stuff, or that you dont need PageRank well, theyre just completely wrong.

If youre trying to make money with your website, you need visitors, and thats where SEO comes in. SEO is important because of the amount of competition you have. When youre competing in a worldwide market, you need to stand out.

Algorithm. A set of rules that a search engine uses to rank the pages contained within its index in response to a particular query. No search engine reveals exactly how its algorithm works, to protect itself both from competitors and from those who wish to spam the search engine.

Back links. These are links to a website from external sources, including other web pages, directories, and advertising.

Banned. When pages are removed from a search engine’s index because the search engine has deemed them to be spamming, or violating one of the search engines other rules.

Click-through rate. How many people clicked on a link, as a percentage of the total number of people that saw the link.

Cloaking. The act of serving content to search engine spiders that is different to what normal visitors would see. Search engines will ban you if they find you doing this.

Contextual links. Contextual links are displayed on web pages when the content on the page indicates to an ad server that the page is a good match for specific keywords or phrases.

Conversion rate. The percentage of visitors to a website who buy something.

Cost per click (CPC). A system where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for each click someone makes on a link leading to their website.

Cost per mille (CPM). A system where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for the number of times an ad is seen, regardless of how many people actually click through. The mille refers to one thousand viewings of the ad.

Crawler. A component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically crawling the web, following links to understand how pages are connected.

De-listing. This is when pages are removed from a search engines index, usually because they havent been updated for a long time.

Directories. A type of search engine where listings are gathered by humans, rather than by automated web crawlers.

Doorway page. A web page created in the hope of improving another pages ranking in a search engines listings. Doorway pages dont give much information to the people viewing them.

Graphical inventory. Banners and other ads that appear depending on the keywords a page contains. This includes pop-ups, browser toolbars and rich media.

Index. The collection of information a search engine has that searchers can query.

Landing page. The web page that a visitor reaches after clicking your search engine listing.

Link popularity. A count of how popular a page is based on the number of other pages that link to it.

Link. A link is text that you can click on to go to another website, or another page on the same website.

Listings. The information that appears on a search engine’s results page in response to a search.

Meta-search engine. A search engine that returns listings from two or more other search engines, instead of using its own index.

Meta tags. Tags placed in a web pages code that pass information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications.

Meta description tag. This meta tag allows pages to provide descriptions to search engines.

Meta keywords tag. Allows authors to add text to a page to help with the search engine ranking process.

Meta robots tag. Allows page authors to keep some web pages from being indexed by search engines. Similar to a robots.txt file.

Natural listings. The listings that search engines do not sell. Instead, sites appear solely because a search engine believes it is important for them to be included, regardless of payment. Note that paid inclusion listings are still treated as natural listings by many search engines.

Outbound links. Links on one website that lead to other websites.

Paid inclusion. An advertising program where pages are guaranteed to be spidered and included in a search engine’s index in exchange for payment.

PPC. Pay-per-click means the same as cost per click (CPC).

Paid listings. Listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion programs.

Pay-for-performance. A term popularized by some search engines as a synonym for pay-per-click. It stresses to advertisers that they are only paying for ads that “perform” in terms of delivering traffic, as opposed to CPM-based ads, where ads cost money even if no-one clicks on them.

Paid placement. An advertising program where listings appear in response to particular search terms, with higher rankings typically obtained by paying more than other advertisers.

Rank. The order in which web pages are listed in search engine results.

Reciprocal link. A link exchange in which two sites link to each other.

Results page. The page that appears after a user enters their search terms.

Robots.txt. A file used to keep web pages from being indexed by search engines.

Search engine. A service designed to allow users to search the web, or another database of information.

Search engine marketing (SEM). Marketing a website using search engines, whether youre improving your ranking in natural listings, purchasing paid listings or some combination of the two.

Search engine optimization (SEO). Altering a website so that it ranks higher in the search engines.

Search terms. The words a searcher enters into a search engine’s search box.

Shopping search. Shopping search engines allow shoppers to search the web for products and their prices.

Spam. Any search engine marketing method that a search engine decides is detrimental to its efforts to deliver relevant search results.

Spider. See crawler.

Submission. The act of sending a URL to a search engine, for inclusion in its index.

XML feeds. A process in which information about a page is fed to the index without using a crawler, for example using RSS.

The best advice is to follow a good search engine promotion system. Keep track of when you submit your sites and how soon theyre indexed — checking once a week is sufficient.

Ranking systems can be confusing and there are often complex factors involved, but you do not need to be an expert in the field to achieve top results. Take a chance after all, you have nothing to lose.

Many thanks to Danny Sullivan, Kevin Lee, Ikonya Nginyo, and all the other volunteers who contributed