Thursday, May 15, 2008

The Importance and Benefits of Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization a.k.a SEO can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software. SEO is a very often discussed subject when it comes to planning a website. Planning Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important steps to take if you want to prepare your website(s) to rank high in the search engines. Especially if you decide to make a business on internet, SEO should be one of the most highly ranked topics. Conclusion: Search engine optimization is the tool that can ensure that your site will be listed within relevant search results, and as close as possible to the top. There is also other techniques which can be considered side by side with Search engine Optimization, for example Article Writing and submission of these to directories. But that is another story.

There is a lot of SEO-strategies to evaluate, but you should consider to meet the requirements of the search engines. The people behind the search engine companies is always working to improve their services and make them better. For a long time now, a lot of webmasters trying to challenge Google, Yahoo, MSN and so on with so-called Black-Hat techniques to push their own, or their customers websites to get better rankings. Some of the following SEO methods are referred to as spamming, and you should always avoid them: Doorway-Pages, hidden links or text, irrelevant keywords in the pages and so on. The search engine companies fight them back and unmask their strategies. The companies wants all the competition to be fairly and honest and don't want that someone will gain advantages in an unethical manner. Everyone have to follow the rules.

But although you decide to follow the rules of the game, there is a lot of legal actions you can take to rank higher in the search engines. Let's say that you want to compete in a certain niche and you recognize that one of the competitors have use some SEO techniques to rank higher. If you perform a smarter and more detailed job around this you will beat the competition. Search engine optimization is representing a large sphere that you have to dedicate a lot of time and specialize on.

Some basic stuff to consider when planning your SEO.

- Keyword research. Use time to find the right keywords for your site and make a strategy for using them correctly. This is often a difficult process, but the very most important step in the process. A good keyword strategy implementation can boost your page right to the top in the search engines for your chosen keyword(s). Be sure that your keyword combination is a good phrase when it comes to terms of searches per day and competition. There is a lot of good tools out there and I can recommend a few: WordTracker - This have a free tool, but also a professional one if you are really serious or might have SEO as your business career. Another good and free tool is google adwords keyword tool. When it comes to software to control this process, www.goodkeywords.com is a fair good one.

- Link Strategies. A good link strategy is of the utmost importance. When already well-ranked sites links back to your site you will have a great advantage, because people will easily find your site. Take your time to find and submit your site to so-called Link Directories, there is hundreds of them out there. This can take time, but you will gain tenfold in profits in the long run. Another link strategy is to have an agreement with others to exchange links.

- Chosing the right domain name. After your keyword research you should pick out a domain name that is relevant for your selected phrase.

- Sitemap. It is always a good optimizing practice to include this, because it give your visitors extra value and the search engines likes it.

Finally, we can say that search engine optimization is more than just optimizing the actual text on a page, it also involves getting a lot of high quality, relevant links from others to your site.

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