|
||
Today every online entrepreneur struggles to be within the first ten rankings of a search engine result. If the search engine is one of the more popular ones, then the competition is fiercer. By using search engine optimization organizations can jumpstart traffic to their site, get noticed and ranked better in search engines.
Keywords and their importance
Keywords are the magic words that attract traffic to your site. Basically when a user searches for something on the Internet, they use certain phrases and words in conjunction. If you site has these phrases, you stand a good chance at being ranked well on search engines. Keywords play a crucial role as far as search engine optimization efforts go. Many companies pay top dollar to find out which keywords are the most popular.
Keyword research
Keyword research is a specialized field of study which is carried out by third party providers. Most Fortune 500 companies regularly shell out large sums of money to find out which are the most common keywords being used. The success of search engine optimization heavily depends on the correct usage of keywords. By using more exact matches (where the keywords are more closely related to what is being searched for), a website has better chances at being ranked in the top ten.
How to optimize a site
Most of the time, it is the title and Meta tags on a website which need to have the correct usage of keywords. Only this will guarantee that search engine optimization will work properly on the site. Even the website content needs to have well-spaced, distributed keywords so as to attract more visitors to the page.
Submissions
Many service providers will offer manual submission to search engines as part of their search engine optimization services. This means that they will manually submit your website link and information to all the popular search engines. If the search engines find the relevant keywords on your site they will automatically place you better.
Why is page ranking important?
Page ranking is crucial to a website's success. Statistics show that most people will not visit any page after the first ten results, except in rare situations where the information has not been found. Thus search engine optimization is all about getting your website ranked within the first ten results.
Link building
A popular way to achieve search engine optimization is through building more links. Most of today's search engines determine page ranking based on the number of links on your site. Literally, it is a question of quantity. The more links your site has, the better your chances at being ranked. In fact most search engines today use spiders or robots to constantly crawl other sites. Once they find relevant keywords, they automatically index the site and place it on their results. Thus search engine optimization is largely dependent on the successful usage of links.
With the ever evolving internet market for just about anything you can imagine and Google's index growing to almost 9 billion pages, and counting, there is little dispute amongst search engine optimizers that our job is getting much harder. From linking to articles, and density to ontology, our industry changes as fast as any other. The search engines, especially Google, seem to be on a daily diet of change and their algorithm seems to be growing at the rate of their index.
The word ‘related' plays a much bigger part in SEO today than it ever has in the past. Instead of targeting an exact keyword phrase, it now makes a lot more sense to keep your site within context and to have related words to your keywords, compared to having density of one keyword phrase. Linking has also turned into a frenzy for relevancy. Unrelated links seem to no longer carry much weight at all. The theme through all of Google's recent changes seems to come down to one cliché: quality over quantity.
Just like with any other update at Google, optimizers must search and research their profession, however it seems to be happening more often than ever. You can't walk through our office without hearing Google's name a thousand times. We have unofficial RND (research and development) meetings almost every hour as there seems to constantly be new ideas and theories popping into all of our heads. In the past there were always changes to the way we've done our work, but the pace of this change is accelerating rapidly as well as the competition for online searchers.
MSN seems to be creating a buzz and they've just recently started a national television ad campaign. Their search results resemble Google's of 6 months ago, a time that will go down in SEO history as “the good old days”, and also a time that Google's SERPs seemed a lot more relevant than they do today. New search engines seem to be popping up all over the place, and after all, wasn't Google a virtual unknown 5 years ago?
One of the best points made to me over the past month came at the preview of the new become.com search engine in California, where founder Michael Yang decreed this to be only the very beginning in the history of online search. Whatever happens in Google's future, and the future of online search, there is one thing for certain: only the most intelligent and innovative of SEO companies are going to stay above the bar and continue to find ways to get their clients, and themselves, to the top.