SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

SEO for CEOs Search Engine Optimization Unmasked for CEOs

If youre like most other CEOs, the term search engine optimization will mean very little. Either that or it means expense! But it doesnt have to be that way If you feel like youre standing in a dark room handing money to strangers to get you in the search engines, then this article is for you.

This is an article written by a business owner for other business owners and CEOs. It explains Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) in laypersons terms. It wont make you an expert, but it will give you some insight into what youre spending your money on, what you should be spending your money on, and just as importantly, what you shouldnt.

But before launching straight into an explanation of SEO, lets talk a bit about search engines. Approximately 75%-80% of website traffic comes through search engines. Whats more, research shows that most people dont look beyond the first 2 pages of search results. This means if your website doesnt rank in the first 2 pages of the major search engines, its only receiving 20% of its rightful traffic and revenue. (And remember, being ranked number 1 when you search for your company name or web address doesnt count. You need to rank highly for the words your customers use at search engines.)

The biggest concern for search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, etc., is finding content that will bring them more traffic (and thus more advertising revenue). They do this by using complex algorithms to determine whether a site is useful and should be included in their search results.

This is where SEO comes in.

SEO is the art of ranking in the search engines. Nothing more, nothing less.

SEO means creating your site such that the search engines consider it useful. The two main weapons in your arsenal are:

Keywords
Links to your site

KEYWORDS

Figure out what words your customers are looking for at search engines, and use those words at your site. By frequently using keywords that are important to your customers, you tell the search engines what you do. These keywords are used in your copy and in the code behind the page. Generally speaking, the more you use the keywords, the more relevant you are to searches in that field.

Keywords in Your Copy

The use of keywords in your copy is easy to understand. But its not easy to do. You cant just pepper your site with a meaningless array of words. The trick is using the most important keywords a lot without compromising the readability of your copy. Its a balance between writing for the search engines and writing for your reader.

TIP: If you find this too time consuming, a website copywriter can take care of it for you. And if you know your keywords already, it should cost you no more than normal web copy.

Keywords in Your HTML Code

The use of keywords in your HTML code is harder to understand, but its easier to do. There are four main places these keywords are used:

Keywords
Description
Alt
Title

TIP: When you hear people talking about meta tags, this is what theyre talking about. To see how meta tags are used in practice, go to Google and pretend youre a customer. Search for something your customers would search for. e.g. If youre in car audio, search for car audio. Click on the first couple of results to bring up their website. Right-click on the home page, and select View Source. Youll see a whole lot of code. You can ignore most of it. What youre looking for are the following

meta name=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”keyword 1,keyword 2,keyword 3″

meta name=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”Meaningful description of page using the main keywords”

img src=”filename.gif” alt=”Meaningful description of picture using the main keywords”

Take a look at the way the creators of the site have used keywords in these areas, and follow their lead. You already know theyre ranked highly, so chances are theyve done a good job. Alternatively, take a look at my site, http://www.divinewrite.com to see how Ive done mine.

LINKS TO YOUR SITE

Now that you know how to tell the search engines what you do, lets talk about how to convince them youre important.

Links to your site (or inbound links) are the most important factor in ranking. The more links you have to your site from other sites, the better your ranking (related sites generate better rankings).

TIP: Think of the Internet as a big election. All the websites in the world are candidates, and all the links to those websites are votes. The more votes (links) a candidate (website) has, the more important it is, and the higher its ranking.

There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software). Others are legitimate, but offer limited results (like asking customers and suppliers to list you on their sites, and adding your site to various business directories). You can experiment with these methods, but Ive always found the best way to generate inbound links is to write helpful articles and let publishers of newsletters and e-zines use them for free on the proviso that they link back to your site.

People who publish e-Zines and newsletters are always hungry for quality content. And there are websites out there dedicated to giving them just that. If you submit a well written, relevant, helpful article to one of those sites, you can have thousands of newsletter publishers ready to snap it up. Then you just sit back and watch the links multiply!

TIP: This method is beneficial in other ways too. Readers of your article will see that you know what youre talking about, and because youre published, theyll see you as an authority.

Its impossible to say how much time youll need to spend generating links. You just have to keep at it until you have achieved a high ranking. Even then, youll still need to dedicate some ongoing time to the task, otherwise your ranking will drop.

Summary

So to cut a long story short, it comes down to this. If you have a lot of the right keyword phrases, used in real sentences, distributed realistically throughout your site, and a lot of links from other relevant sites, you stand a good chance of being ranked highly.

Thats what youre paying your providers for. And thats what SEO is all about.

Many people wonder how search engines really work. Although the details are complex, this article aims to give you some insight into the process without getting too technical. Read on…

Most search engines have three parts: a crawler, an index, and a search interface. Let’s look at each part individually, to get a better understanding of them. Each part has its own role to play in the process, with all the parts working together to make searches possible.

The Crawler.

Also known as a ’spider’ or ‘bot’, this part of the search engine wanders the web, following links and picking up information for its database. Crawlers do most of their work at times of the day when search engines are less busy, but they typically visit frequently updated pages more often. This is something to keep in mind when you’re working on your pages. As you may want to perform updates locally and update them when they have been finished rather than updating bits and pieces and hoping that the search engine runs into the correct version.

Also, crawlers ignore some things: your site’s code, for example. Your site’s title and text - your ‘content’ - is the most important thing to a crawler. The fastest way to raise your sites search engine ranking for specific key words is to implement them into your title and your content.

The Index.

Once the crawler has collected all that text, it is then stored and indexed. This allows people searching for keywords and phrases to get results relating to what they were searching for - their search results. Most sites will incorporate rating systems such as Google Page Ranks or Alexa rankings in positioning your site. These ratings are used to attempt to ensure that sites that are important receive more traffic than unimportant sites.

To see this in action, go to a search engine and type in a word. You’ll see some text on the page saying something like “results 1-10 of 345,000″. This means that the search engine’s index contains 345,000 pages it believes are related to the word you typed. If you wanted to, you could look through all these pages to find the information you’re looking for.

In order to understand rating systems more thoroughly consider your own site. When you place links on your site you generally due so in order to increase your users understanding of the content of your site. If every site in a particular field links to a particular site, this site is probably very important to that field and should, therefore, be listed highly in the lists of search engine results. Thus the basic ideology of Google Page Ranks.

Consider again, a site that receives a great deal of traffic. If a site is receiving loads and loads of traffic, it probably has some information or service that is very important to its users. Alexa ratings attempt to estimate the amount of traffic that a particular site gets and compare it to the amount of traffic that other sites get. The closer that a site is to the most trafficked site on the internet, the more likely it is to have important content if it is relevant to the search query.

The Interface.

Search engines provide a public interface for users who want to find information on the web. They can type the word or phrase they’re searching for, and the interface will run an algorithm to find the pages relevant to their search and display them.

These algorithms are an important part of the SEO (search engine optimization) business, and the search engines are constantly changing them. You’ll notice when the algorithms change, as the rankings of your website will change with them.

No two search engines are the same. They all work differently, with their own unique features, and they will all respond to your website in their own way. You should familiarize yourself with the most popular search engines, to better understand how each of them works.

The most popular search engines today include Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. There are many other search engines available, though, and you shouldn’t ignore them altogether.

When you submit your website to the search engines, there’s no way of knowing when they might add it to their indexes. Since each search engine has its own crawling and indexing methods, you can’t be sure how long it might take. In some cases, you might see results within a week, but don’t count on it - it may take several weeks or even months before you see anything.

It’s not easy to get a high ranking unless you spend some time on it, and learn the proper methods. When you take the time and do some research, you’ll find that it’s not as confusing as you first thought. Learning the basics will enhance your experience more than you would have thought possible.