The Importance of Search Engines

Filed Under (SEO Basics) by admin on 14-09-2009

0

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:
The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus its obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Dont forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert. With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Why Content is King.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 20-08-2009

0

You have heard it time and time again: Content is King. Yet still people ignore the truth of this common-sense phrase. People use the web to find information its the content of a page that is important to them, because thats why theyre there.

The content of a page is the primary thing that a search engine will look at when considering your site. The meta tags and the hidden text that many people like to place on their pages in order to draw search engines to their sites is much less important to the search engine. Many search engines dont even consider meta tags any more. Dont get me wrong, meta tags are a necessity when optimizing, but they are much less important than content.

Hidden text is not only skipped over by most search engines, it can give you serious problems with search engines. The king of search engines, Google, will remove sites from its index if they utilize hidden text. Hidden text is categorized as text that is the same color (or similar color to) the background or text that is the set as transparent using CSS.

When people arrive at your site, one of two things will happen. They will either find something of interest and stay, or theyll turn around and leave. They make this decision within seconds. You need to have things that people want to read, or all your precious click-throughs will be for nothing. If you cant come up with something to put on the front page of your site, hire a writer. Writers are there to create reasons for people to stay. They get paid for a reason, they are worth while.

You can never have too much information its a fact that people want information. The web is great for information because you can find so much out there with so little effort. Hidden somewhere in all that information, you can be sure theres something that youd love to find. Search engines are there to help you uncover it.

You could take some of this information and tailor it to your websites needs, using bits and pieces that will be easy to read and useful to your visitors. The more interested in your website a visitor is, the more likely that theyll stay a while, and come back some other time. You might even see some money from them, sooner or later.

Borrowing content word-for-word isnt the way to go, though, because of copyright laws but you can always create your own content. Remember that the most valuable web content is unique information that no-one can find elsewhere.

Another great method for delivering content is to provide RSS feeds from other sites straight onto your site. Many sites i.e. the New York Times site will allow you to put their RSS feeds onto your site. An RSS feed is basically an online news bulletin. If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or lower you probably havent encountered RSS. If you use FireFox or Opera for your web browser, you probably already know how great RSS can be for personal use. Imagine having all of that content available on your web site without having to pay a writer!

When selling products and services, make sure that you have enough information about your products features. Include everything anyone could ever want to know about your product. If you are running an affiliate site, buy a few of the products that you are selling and use them on a regular basis. This will give you the opportunity to find out what their major selling points are and allow you to make them into featured products and provide high quality reviews.

Think of it as leading your reader for a walk through your mind arrange the site to help your readers see what you see.

For example: a page on music, could lead to a page on rock music, which in turn leads to one about the various forms of music, which leads to a page on equipment, and so on and on. Each page on the site can lead into the next, in a reasonable progression of thought. Your content becomes not only new but also fun to experience, as you make it easy for the reader to understand where youre coming from. Tell a story with your pages.