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.

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Dont submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like http://www.google.com hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one:

http://www.webposition.com/order/trial.asp?WT.mc_id=google%3A%7Bifsearch%3Asearch%7D%7Bifcontent%3Acontent%7D%3A%7Bcreative%7D%3Atrial%3A%7Bkeyword%7D&WT.srch=1

Or if you want professional help try the following sites:

http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission

http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html

Dont use the automatic submission services.

Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies:

Search Engines
Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista
Google, HotBot
Excite/Webcrawler

Directories
AOL Search Inktomi
Lycos Open Directory
MSN, Yahoo!
LookSmart Snap

Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The following links gives info on other search engines and directories:

http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm

http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm