SEO-Search Engine Optimization

You've probably heard of SEO, since it's very hot right now. It stands for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a site by designing the site content so that the site ranks high in the search results of a search engine.

The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that a user will visit that site. Let's face it, most people are lazy.

They're not going to spend time clicking and scanning tons of pages of search results.

Therefore, where a site ranks in a web search is absolutely critical for directing more traffic toward the site.

SEO helps to make sure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

To understand how this works, you need to know a little bit about how search engines work. Typically, a search engine sends out a spider to fetch as many documents as it can.

Then another program, called an indexer, reads these documents and makes an index based on the words each document contains. Each search engine uses a unique proprietary algorithm to create indexes so that hopefully only meaningful results are returned for each query.

These indexers compute the keyword density. Keyword density refers to the how often a certain word appears in a given document. It's given as a percentage.

Let's say you have a site about running shoes. A keyword density of 7% on "running" on that web page means that out of 1000 words, 70 of them are "running." Unfortunately, the quick-buck con artists have figured this out, and they will put up a site that has a front page that is totally littered with keywords.

To give you an idea, a normal key word density for the main key words is about 3 to 7%. What these people will do is have something insane like a 25% keyword density on their front page. Then that page ranks #1 in search engine results when users search for that word. Once the user is on the entry page, they're likely to enter the site.

Search engines used to use meta-tags to search for web sites. This was nice, since the meta-tag was a hidden area of your page where you could put all the relevant keywords and not have to worry about making your content sound awkward by overusing certain words.



We decided not to go any deeper into this topic here. Instead, we felt it would be better to direct you to the leading authority in SEO: Brad Callen.

Download his free PDF ebook from this link (right-click and save):
http://www.money-adsense.com/bonus/seo-made-easy.zip



Tools, Tools, Tools...

There are tons of free online SEO tools available on the internet. Most feature some very impressive statistics and information to help you optimize your website, analyze search engine positions, research your competitors, and lots of other things.

There are two ways you can use these free online SEO tools:

(1) If you're new to SEO, these tools provide excellent insight on how a website is performing and ranking. Use them to highlight issues and trends with your website and provide indicators for where optimization work is necessary.

(2) If you've had some experience with SEO, these tools will act as a complement to the more specialized SEO tools, like WebPosition Gold or SEO Elite. You can also use them to supplement an SEO's internal knowledge base and experience.

Here are some choice tools for both new SEO users and more experienced SEO users:

Article: How To Snatch An Expiring Domain
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog

Use this article to guide you when getting after an expired domain with high PageRank. Some suggest you put some text links back to the sites you want to boost! A few PR updates later you will find your new site having a PR -1 from the one you bought!

Keyword Research Tool
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com

Use this to research appropriate words and phrases to include in your webpage's body text so that you'll rank higher. It's easy to use. You just enter the word or phrase you want to be found under, then the tool suggests additional words and phrases for you to consider using. You also have the option to select from a range of top search engines, e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma, etc.

Keyword Analyser Tool
http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php

This one will read the body of the page and give you a report on what words are used and how many times they are used.
Since most engines rank sites depending on that site's keyword density (which typically ranges between 3% and 9%), this is a really good tool to have.

Search Engine Position Checker Tool
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com

This tool checks to see if your website appears in the first fifty results in major search engines for your designated keyword or phrase. If your URL is present, the tool outputs what position it occupies. This tool also lets you know if any other URLs from your domain appear in the search results.

Link Popularity Tool
http://www.linkpopularity.com

This tool will measure the total number of links or "votes" that a search engine finds for your website. One of the best feature is that besides tabulating data, it also produces a very cool graph of the resulting data. One other nice feature is the ability to compare your website to your competitors to help you with your overall marketing strategy.

Meta Tag Generator
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com

This automatically generates a Meta Keyword tag by reading the page you specify, removing common words from it, and picking the most used words on the page. Extra weight is given to words in a heading tag (etc.)

Search Term Suggestion Tool
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

This one tells you how many times a certain keyword was searched for at Overture.com. It will also show all related searches for that keyword. It's a good thing to use to determine search frequency among related keyword phrases

Top Keywords
Keywords

Keywords offers the top 500 searched internet keywords compiled from a database of over 300 million search terms extracted from popular metacrawlers. Ideal for search engine marketing and pay per click advertising in Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), MSN Keywords, Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings, etc

Contact Webmaster - Ask-Anders.com