SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

SEO is a continuing process and one that should not be ignored. As you know, or will soon realize, is that the search engines are the main entry point at which your customers will find your website. But there are other issues you must be aware of to get the targeted customers that you want.

Keywords
You may have optimized your webpages and people are coming — but not many. Why? It could be the keywords you are choosing.

Choosing the right keywords take time and effort, and it is an important factor to consider. When choosing keywords you should be asking yourself -

1.) What are the exact words people are using to find the product or service that you are offering. For example: Is it refurbished tools, cheap tools, free tools, red, ugly tools — you get my meaning.

2.) Are my keywords too general, or overused. If the keywords are too general, you may receive visitors that are not buyers, just browsers. If the keywords are overused, you may be so far down in the search engine rankings that your site will never be seen.

3.) Do you have your keywords or keyword phases in your “Title Tag”. Your keywords in the Title Page should be relevant to what your web copy relates too. If it doesn’t, you’ve just wasted an important keyword tool that the Search Engines utilize.

4. Meta Keywords Tag — Some people use the meta keywords Tag and others say that the search engines no longer use them. And still others, claim that it gives their competition an unfair advantage. I personally will continue to use them, because I don’t believe all the search engines ignore this tag.

Finding the correct keywords is no easy task. However, did you think of asking the people around you what keywords or phases they would use to get to one of your web pages. You might be surprised — it may not have been a keyword or phase that you even considered.

Popularity
Even though a keyword may be popular to the masses, you also must consider if it is targeting your specific market. Why? You may begin to get the traffic, but not the specific target market that will buy your products. And that is the bottom line, not so much the popularity of the word, as the quality of the traffic that the keyword brings.

And if the keyword is popular, you may find your web page competing with established websites — which translates into poor positioning. Thus, you could consider other smaller niche words, and still get the ranking you seek.

Experiment
You will have to experiment with the keywords that you use on your webpage/website, to determine if the keywords you are using is giving you the sales you want.

I have found testing, evaluating and re-evaluating is the name of the game of SEO. If you keep that in mind, you will begin to see the results you want.

However, once you are in the top ten of the search engines, do not think your job is done. You must continue to monitor — because the Internet is not a static environment — and people can come online that can slide your web page or website down the line in the search engines.

There are hundreds of search engines available today, but some are far more complex than others. This article will give you an overview of how some of the most popular ones work.

Lets start with a smaller engine: InfoSeek. They only index about 200 words of your web page, so its important to make sure that you have meta tags on your site, and that the most important things are listed first. The information you put in your meta tags will be used to display a description of your site, and most meta tags can contain about 200 characters of text. The keywords meta tag, however, can have up to 1,000 characters.

These simple rules are important to keep in mind for all search engines. The more important that the information is, the closer it has to be to the beginning of your meta tags or even the beginning of your sites content. Many search engines wont even touch your meta tags so it is important that you have the same information in your body that you have in your meta tags (although you obviously cannot simply enter lists and lists of key words as this would be detrimental to your sites content).

The AltaVista search engine will send Scooter, its spider, to check out your entire site. Scooter can take as long as three months to spider and fully index your site the average spider only takes 6-8 weeks. Scooter will normally spider somewhere between two and ten pages from your site each week. This means that the longer that your web site lasts, the better it will be indexed which is in example of how search engines implement Darwins Theory into their ideology.

Excite used to be a search powerhouse, but has now been dropped as the provider of AOL and Netscape search, so its less important than it once was. The algorithm it uses to determine keyword relevance is very complicated: it indexes your pages and then attempts to summarize them by selecting only the most relevant sentences. Expect to have your pages reviewed roughly once every two weeks. Keep in mind, though, that with meta tags have no meaning to Excite when it comes to rankings, even though it will use your description tags as long as the words are relevant to your pages content.

Lets move on to Lycos. Lycos has fully integrated the Open Directory Project (ODP) into their mainstream results pages, and they also use search results from AllTheWeb. Lycos also runs click-throughs to their sister site HotBot. Lycos is one of the harder search engines to understand, as their submission pages say one thing but then they index your site in a completely different way. As a general rule of thumb, your site will be indexed in Lycos in due time as long as you get indexed in ODP and AllTheWeb.

Even though WebCrawler is owned by Excite, it still has its own search engine and indexer. If you happen to be listed with WebCrawler, you should try to stay listed with them, as it isnt the easiest search engine to get listed with. Its hit-and-miss standards combined with the sporadic indexing methods makes the submission process tough, although not impossible.

The biggest player is, of course, Google, who use a page ranking system as the central basis of their index. It was once nearly impossible to manipulate this page ranking system to drive up your rankings, but people quickly figured out that the more links they could generate to their site on the rest of the net, the better Google ranked them. Google is not thought to be using context-sensitive rankings. Context-sensitive information is used at Yahoo, Looksmart and the ODP, however, and Google regularly spiders those sites when it re-indexes its own database.

MSN is another important search engine. The holy trinity of search engines at the moment is Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These three search engines combine to provide you with the vast majority of the traffic that you will receive from search engines. MSN will generally be the first search engine to index your site and it will almost certainly list the most pages the fastest.

Although no-one can tell you exactly when you will be indexed on any search engine, its best to check back at least weekly. Whatever you do, though, dont re-submit your site more often than every two months or so you might not get indexed at all if you do this.

It is recommended to use keywords in page titles itself. This title tag is different from a Meta tag, but it’s worth considering it in relation to them. Whatever text one places in the title tag (between the portions) will appear in the title bar of browsers when they view the web page. Some browsers also append whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, as for example Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or OPERA.

The actual text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

If you have designed your website as a series of websites or linked pages and not just a single Home Page, you must bear in mind that each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site.

The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page.

The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking.

So, while you want your business name in the title of the home page, it is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. Why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display closer to the top of the search engine listing.

Dedicating first three positions for keywords in title avoiding the stop words like and, at and the like is crucial in search engine optimization.