SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) EXPLAINED

Do You Know What's SEO ?

What is Google?

Google started in 1998 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two Ph.D. students
from Stanford were working on a project to create a search engine ranking
system. They developed a system that ranks pages in terms of their
‘importance’. This patented ‘PageRank’ technology is the driving force behind
Google’s rise to search engine dominance. Letting a few friends use the site in

beta mode, more and more people started to use Google until 10,000 search queries were being answered
per day. Today, Google answers more than 200 million search queries a day, indexing over 3 billion
webpages.

There are three major types of search engines ‘spider’ or ‘crawler’ engines, directories and hybrids. Google
is a crawler-based engine

Crawler Search Engines

A crawler search engine, like Google, ‘crawls’ or ‘spiders’ through your website and all its related links.
This means that the spider will visit your website then read all the pages and follow all the links. Spiders usually return to your website every month or so to look for changes. Everything the spider finds goes into an index.
The index is like a large catalogue containing a copy of every webpage the spiders find in cyberspace. If
your webpage changes, then the spider should find this change and update the index. When you type in a
keyword or phrase into a crawler-based search engine the search engine software sifts through the millions
of pages stored in the index and gives you the results it believes is most relevant to your search query.

Most crawler-based search engines work in this way with minor changes to software, indexing, etc. That is
why if you type the same query into different search engines you can get varied results.

Directories

Directories differ from crawler-based search engines in that you, as a webmaster, submit a short description
about your site, which is then categorised by humans. Search results are based on what is in the
description about your site.

Hybrids
Hybrid search engines are a combination of the two types of search engines listed above


SEO
(Search engine Optimization)

Do You Know What's SEO ?

Webmasters know just as much about SEO as anyone

Do You Know What's SEO ?



Respectfully, that is totally incorrect. Many
web designers and web masters recoil in horror
when asked to incorporate lead capture into
a site because they are less concerned about
selling anything than they are with aesthetics:
the look and feel of your site. We all want our
sites to “look good,” but it is far more important
that they “work good.” SEO/SEP is a specialty
and the vast majority of web designers and
webmasters know so little about it as to actually
unintentionally hinder your ability to be found.
Just as a homeowner who tries to FSBO the sale
of their home is often without a clue as to what
lies in store in the process you help the client
complete, the same can be said about SEO/
SEP and web designers and webmasters. In
general: most of them read some dusty tome
about “keywords” years ago, but most of them
wouldn’t know Google’s algorithm if it were
written on the sidewalk in front of their office.
Your Internet marketing is one of the most
important parts of your business and you should
only hire professional SEO/SEP companies with
demonstrable success, reporting systems that
allow you to verify the processes they claim
to be doing for you, and the results of those
processes.

SEO

(Search engine Optimization)

Links and linking

Do You Know What's SEO ?

Right up there as number two on off-page
factors is “number of inbound links.” If only it
were that simple. Just any inbound link will not
affect much. The inbound links must be strong,
relevant, and number over 30 before they do
much good for you. DO NOT get snookered by
“reciprocal linking” offers; they will hurt your

SEO, not help it. DO NOT put 20 links leading
off your site that do not return when closed.
That will hurt you, too. If you want to provide
links, do it only with a “return” option, and if
the party to whom you are linking won’t provide
that, save yourself aggravation and put down a
web address not linked, instead.

As you can see, a multitude of factors make
up the “off-page” algorithm, too. I have always
thought you are better off by teaming with
professionals and leaving your performance
to them. Remember, these professionals have
technical teams that monitor the search engines
algorithms every day and react accordingly
to keep you well placed and findable. That’s
the other component: just when you might
think you have all this down and understood,
someone moves the cheese and changes the
formula, the recipe, the algorithm. You can
either drop everything and cancel your showing
appointments for a few days to react, or you can
ignore that worry by having your professionals
handle all that for you. I admit that this can
appear self-serving, but I truly believe it to be
so, and I guarantee you that no SEO or SEP
amateur can obtain the results our clients
experience daily. This process is never finished;
it is always a work in progress. But the payoff
to that work can be fabulous! For example: one
broker has tripled traffic from 55,000 visits to
155,000 visits a month; one client, with only
one office, mines the Internet like few others (he
went from 30,000 visits a month to 95,000 visits
a month; obviously, he was very adept to begin
with); another client gained 35 listings in one
high end neighborhood in one year by using his
search engine placement to prove his mastery
of the Internet to his listing presentations;
clients become “relocation specialists” and sell
a house a month to relocating families. What’s
your market? SEO and SEP can help make you
more effective in it, whatever it is. When these
successes are evaluated, they all have one thing
in common: these professional realtors leave the
SEO and SEP to professionals, and they reap the
benefits they could not otherwise gain.

Also, remember that search professionals have
access to proprietary tools you do not have access
to. If you try to guess what to optimize your site
to reflect, you will most likely guess wrong and
not get the traffic. Pros have tools that tell them
exactly where the traffic goes when looking
for homes. Also, the reality is that you cannot
possibly maintain maximum performance on all
those criteria listed above on your own. Those
professionals would cost more than you want to
spend. In my opinion, you are better off with
a specialized company that does just this for
realtors and related fields, and influences about
80% of the factors for a reasonable monthly
price. Hold them accountable, and leave this
technical tinkering to the professionals. You will
outperform 99% of all your competition when
it comes to being found, provided you also
arrange for search engine placement.

SEO

(Search engine Optimization)

Improving Your Results & Sustaining Performance

SEO

Search engine marketing changes quite rapidly, as do competitor listings. The objective of this final phase is to ensure through the remainder of the engagement that your staff fully understand the principles and trends of search marketing through mentoring, repetition, ongoing knowledge transfer, and applied learning in order to maintain the performance levels we help you achieve. You receive unlimited phone and email support to answer questions as we guide you towards executing the necessary changes prescribed by our full website evaluation.

· Enhance and tweak the newly optimized site based on observable results achieved over a six-month period.
· Instruct content contributors on how to write and/or edit content so that it is search engine friendly.
· Advise content contributors on how to target particular search terms and create content around keyword themes.

SEO

(Search engine Optimization)

The Risks of Traditional Search Engine Optimization

E-commerce companies who have churned through dozens of SEO firms report only marginal, 5-10% traffic increases. A fact confirmed by our recent research into the SEO experience of 100 US catalog companies – see the “State of Search Engine Marketing 1.0 report published by Catalog Age Magazine.

Why? Most SEO companies (Iconocast reports some 250 SEO firms) offer “band aid” solutions (e.g. mirror/static sites, additional search engine specific content – primarily doorway pages – or cosmetic content changes) rather than reworking sites to make content search engine friendly. Google – the dominant engine, with 80% market share (Nielsen Netratings) – cannot be fooled with HTML trickery in the longer term.

Additional risks you face in hiring an SEO firm, besides low ROI and results, include:
· Fees that range from hundreds to $25,000 a month
· No guarantee of the knowledge quality or workmanship
· Misinformation that results in penalties or bans that can permanently tarnish your business/website’s reputation

The CTO of Google has said that designing a content-rich site that other sites link to is the only way to get good rankings. This is what Netconcepts offers SEO clients: the knowledge to create a search engine friendly and most importantly Google-friendly site, that will stay that way over time.

Netconcepts prefers to partner with you to solve your fundamental site problems and share our knowledge and latest trends with you. We favor restructuring and tweaking existing content to present it in a search engine friendly way. The process begins with identification of appropriate keywords and identifying ways to make these keywords prominent in site content. We then take steps to make this keyword optimized content accessible and therefore visible to search engine spiders

SEO
(search engine Optimization)

The Key to Online Success A site for sore eyes

According to Bruce Clay, an Internet Business Consultant and a specialist in SEO training, "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science of search as it relates to marketing on the web." In layman's terms, it's how to reconfigure a web site so that it will be ranked higher than other pages containing similar content. Often this entails analyzing and replacing the code that makes up a web site. Says Clay, "It is not the job of Search Engine Optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the web site so that it becomes an eagle." An ideally optimized web site will have been constructed with the express purpose of being attractive to the search engine spiders who "crawl" through the web, searching out sites to add to their databases. A variety of techniques are used, the effectiveness of which is magnified by being used in conjunction with one another. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Books have been written on the subject of search engine optimization (eg: Shari Thurow's "Search Engine Visibility"), but for our purposes here we can summarize the basics into Eight Simple Rules for Search Engine Success: 1. Leave out the bells and whistles -- A search engine success strategy can be dead in the water before it even begins if certain web site design features are used in constructing the site. Frames and Flash Intros are definite no-nos, as is the use of Javascript and Image Maps for site navigation. Dynamic URLs are another problem since they effectively "reset" the site every time they change. Search engine spiders like simplicity and stability, so should your web site designer. 2. Keywords are key -- Keyword phrases are, well, the keys to the kingdom. The idea is to be the target that searchers are aiming at, and that means thinking like them. A site that sells race car tires should not use "race car tires" as a keyword phrase because it's much more likely that a searcher will use a much more specific phrase when they're searching online for race car tires. Entering "race car tires" will bring up over a million sites, but entering "Goodyear D1490 rear drive tires" might only bring up a half dozen sites. If that's what you're selling and what someone is searching for, odds are you've just made a sale. Each page of a site should have its own set of keywords and keyword phrases. There are several free web sites where keywords can be tested for effectiveness. 3. The vital Title Tag -- A list of results from a search will display the various site names along with a sentence or two describing the site. This information comes from the title tag, and search engine spiders home in on a page's title tag and the keywords it contains. A common mistake web page designers make is to jam as many keywords as possible into the title tag. Search engines may interpret this to be "keyword spamming" and blacklist the site (blacklisting by Google is permanent!). A concise title and a couple of free flowing, descriptive sentences should run about 60 to 70 characters. 4. Meta tags -- Meta tags aren't as important as they used to be, but using them can boost a site's standing with the search engines IF they're properly optimized. An ideal meta tag is actually a pair of tags called Meta Description and Meta Keywords. The Description tag should be under 250 characters long and include several of the most important keyword phrases. The Keywords tag is usually about 1,000 characters long and needs to be stocked with pertinent keywords and keyword phrases. It's a good idea to include common misspellings since, wrong or not, they'll be used by people doing searches. 5. The Copy -- What a site says is just as important as how it's said. Each page of the site should contain at least 200 words of copy, and the copy should be keyword intensive. A good practice is to construct separate informational pages that link to the site's main page. This will serve to further attract the search engine spiders and other sites will find and link up to these info pages. 6. The "ALT" Image Attribute -- The images at a web site are often neglected resources. The HTML code for each image has or can be given an ALT attribute, and keywords can be inserted into that attribute. The original purpose of the ALT attribute was to display that familiar yellow description box when a cursor is moved over the image, but with the advent of search engines it's become even more useful. The descriptive phrase should certainly be used, but it should include keywords since the spiders are going to read the attribute's text. There are test sites that will indicate whether any of a page's images do not include keywords, a very useful (and free) resource! 7. Links, links and more links -- The search engines place a greater importance on link-rich web sites, perhaps because they're more "serious". Too many links, though, and a site risks being tagged as a "link farm" resulting in the site being at least ignored and at worst blacklisted. Relevant hyperlinks will help a site's standings, however. As always, keywords should be included within the text of the link and also in the site copy in front of and after the link. Give the spiders more meat to chew on, in other words. 8. Submit it -- Once a site is activated, the search engine spiders will find it... eventually. Time is money, so why wait? Every search engine has a submission form and the search engine world doesn't stop at Google. It will still take a while for a new web site to be listed after it's submitted. Approximate listing times range from one week at Altavista to two months at AOL, with the average being about one month.



Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) - The Key to Online Success

Search Engine Optimization, or "SEO", has become essential for companies who hope to establish a successful online presence. The Web is a much more crowded place these days; it seems like everyone and their mother has a web site. How does a Widget company get through to interested customers in such a crowded medium? A potential customer searching online for a Widget supplier simply doesn't have the time or patience to browse through dozens of pages of results when they type "Widgets" and hit "enter". If your Widget company's web site isn't listed on the first page or two of search results, it's pretty much a given that the searcher will quickly find what they're looking for and won't spend time digging any deeper. Let's say that your company, "Worldwide Widgets", has blown their online advertising budget on creating a flashy multi-page web site with all the bells and whistles. After a month, the sales results come in and they're a disaster: site traffic is negligible and a test search brings up the site, finally, on the 67th page. The Boss is less than pleased. If things don't improve soon, heads will roll. That's the bad news. The good news is that effective use of search engine optimization can bring miraculous results.



Search Engine Optimization(SEO)