Improve Google Ranking with SEO

October 8, 2008

In a report published by USA Today, there are almost 100% of Internet users who are utilizing search engines such as Google to look for a product or even buy one. That means that the market is definitely huge, and if you know how to play your cards right, you can actually have a good share in the market pie. Yet where are you in the Internet?

It’s not uncommon of online businesses to be lost among the millions of indexed pages, hardly ever appearing in search results. However, you know that these are the ones that don’t succeed and will eventually fold up. If you don’t want to be placed in such a situation later on, you may want to implement one of the most effective online marketing strategies: search engine optimization (SEO).

How SEO Can Help You
SEO is simply tweaking the pages of your website to make them appear friendlier to Google. For example, this mega search engine highly favors websites that are relevant to the key phrases commonly searched by Internet users. Thus, to obtain such favor, an SEO specialist will add meta tags that will include these keywords. He/she may also link your website to other related ones to further establish your relevancy and even your authority on the niche that you’ve chosen. Technically, SEO can help you rank better because of the inbound links that you’re going to get.

What Should You Do Then?
Improving your ranking in Google can be accomplished in two ways: paid and non-paid. Non-paid strategies include link development, content writing, off-page optimization, directory and article directory submission, as well as press release submission. They are considered non-paid, since they are completely free of charge.

They are also more preferred by Google for one good reason: if your website is not good enough, then nobody else would accept or even link to it.  Moreover, the effects of these strategies are more long-term.
The only downside is that it will take months before you can actually see the results. Free submission to directories, for instance, will take 1 to even 6 months before your website can get approved. You may then need to pair your non-paid strategies with paid ones. It may cost you some, but definitely not a lot, and results are guaranteed to be really fast, as short as 24 hours.

Should You Do This Alone?
There’s no question about it, SEO can be handled by just one person—but can you? There are a lot of factors that would probably make you think twice. First, you have to take into consideration the fact that SEO is ever-changing, and keeping tabs on the new methodologies can sometimes be too exhausting. You can also have other responsibilities to take care of, more importantly, how you can better your products so they are worthy of your customer’s trust. 

You may want then to work with an SEO company who can be your best partner in making sure that you can obtain a very good placement in Google.

Search Engine Optimization

July 7, 2008

search engine optimization

What is Search Engine Optimization and how can it help your business? Quite simply, Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it commonly known is the process of organizing your website to be ‘read’ by search engines in the most effective manner. The result, hopefully, means that the quantity and quality of traffic is vastly improved. The earlier a website appears in search result pages and the higher its ranking, the more traffic it will generate.

Search engines are the gatekeeper for users looking for specific information on the Internet. Search engines read the programming language of your website known as HTML or Hyper Text Markup Link. HTML is text-based information on a web page identifying all text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists and so on.

‘Spidering’ is a web-crawler program used by search engines that runs an automated script to browse the web in an automated and methodical manner. Search engines use spidering to obtain up-to-date data, although they can also be used to automate tasks on a website or index downloaded pages to increase the speed of searches. They also are used to check links and validate HTML code. This bot or program starts with a list of URLs to visit and then identifies all the hyperlinks on the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit.

There are specific types of search that a user can employ: industry-specific, local and image. An ‘Industry-Specific’ search is based on the category of a company such as ‘plumbing’ or ‘dentist’. A ‘Local Searchallows users to geographically constrain searches against local businesses. And an ‘Image Search’ is specifically designed to find pictures, images, animation, etc. Your website should be optimized for these types of searches.

As a marketing strategy SEO analyzes how searches work and what people want. While this is a truly wonderful marketing tool, one must be aware that with every positive there is a negative. For example a “black hat seo”, while not too commonly known amongst Internet users is harmful to the effectiveness of your SEO. It uses spam-dexing, keyword stuffing and link farms which impede the search engine experience. You want to completely avoid sites that utilize these techniques.