How to Use Search Engine Optimization

If you have an online business and you have been trying to grow it with your website, have you ever thought about using SEO?

Believe it or not, many business owners are not familiar with search engine optimization and do not exactly understand what it is or how it works.  Here, we will talk about how your website will be able to function better because you will be using this process and what some of the benefits are.  We will also touch on how you can optimize your website quickly, easily and effectively, so you will gain a good customer base and truly get more and more sales and in turn, more profit!

One thing that you need to remember whenever it comes to optimization services is that you can do it yourself, however there are companies out there that specialize in optimizing websites and they know all of the right keywords and know exactly how to drive traffic to your website quickly and easily.  A company can be costly though, so if you do not have the funds just yet, you may want to start out doing the process yourself and then move to a company as soon as you have the funds.

Now that you know some ways that you can use SEO on your website, the next thing that we are going to touch on is how it can help drive traffic to your website.  Search engine optimization actually is a process that involves keywords and the use of keywords on your website, as mentioned above and when your website is optimized, you will see a huge increase in traffic as well as customers, which is why you got into an online business in the first place!

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What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the basic skills you need to know and understand in order to make money online. This article gives you a brief overview of what SEO is and how you can apply it to your website.

If you're interested in making money online, there are two key things your website has to accomplish. It has to be seen by a ton of visitors. (We call that "traffic".) And, some large proportion of your visitors need to do whatever it is you want them to do--fill out a form, download your book, click through to your affiliate site and buy the product. (We call this "conversions".)
SEO addresses the first of these two concerns--traffic.

There are a zillion ways of getting traffic. You can pay for it with pay per click, for instance. Or, you can create it through manipulating your web page content so the page naturally appears in the top ten results every time someone searches on whatever keyword your page is focused on.

The process of manipulating your content so Google and other search engines naturally return your page near the top of their organic search is what SEO is all about.
Let's look at how you accomplish this.
First off, let's understand what I mean by "organic search results".
When you search Google for a particular term, you get the search engine results page (SERP) with the results of your search on it. That page is broken up into three sections.

1. At the top are two search results. These are almost always spots the advertiser has paid for via Google AdWords.
2. Along the right-hand side are a list of ads. These, too, are paid for with Google AdWords.
3. Starting two lines down from the top and running down the rest of the page are what we call your "organic search results".

Organic search results are not paid for. They are the results that Google thinks will best fulfill your search term.

Independently of returning results for searches, Google is busy cataloging web pages. They have software called "spiders" that comb the Internet returning web page addresses and content. Google makes a sort of map of these web pages, so that when you search on a particular term, they can return the web pages that are already cataloged, which seem to best fit your particular search term.
Google's whole mission in life is to return the most relevant pages possible for your search term. (It really is! This is their corporate mantra.)

So, the goal of SEO is to get your web page to rank as high as possible in Google's organic search results.

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SEO Training (Part 3)

You spend countless hours designing the perfect webpage only to find out a couple of days later that your published content does not sit on the radar of the giant search engine providers. So why is this? Let's look at a couple of scenarios that could cause those hardworking search engine bots to overlook your webpage.

(a.) You include forms on your website that require users to input information before they can see your content - There are various reasons that you may have a form on your webpage: you may want to capture a users personal information in order to setup an account for them or you may want them to complete a marketing survey or it could simply be a password protected website. Your intentions may be sincere but could have an adverse affect on whether the content that sits behind those forms can be found and indexed by the search engines. Bots will not try to attempt filling out forms so any links that are connected to those forms will be overlooked by the crawlers.

(b.) Your webpages may literally have thousands of links pointing to it - In reality, search engine bots can only crawl on a certain number of links on a webpage at a time. This is done purposely in order to reduce spam and make the rankings between webpages conservative. That being said, there will be a good probability that those bots will overlook some of those webpages that are accessible by those huge number of links.

(c.) The "Meta Robots Tag" - The meta robots tag is used by the web master to restrict access to the webpage by the robots. Why would a web site owner do that you may ask? Well, simply put, in addition to the good search engine bot and crawlers there are also malicious bots as well so the meta robots tag would protect your web content from them, but in the process you may end up restricting good bots as well.

(d.) Using JavaScript code for your links - Best practices suggest that you use HTML links as these are easily read by search engines as opposed to using links that are embedded within JavaScript code - search engines have a hard time reading these links and hence give little attention to them.

(e.) The use of the "Robots.txt" file - This file has the same function as the meta robots tag in that it polices the links that are on the webpage and blocks spiders and crawlers from traversing them. Be careful when using the robots.txt file because you may also block legitimate crawlers from finding your content through those links.

So, by understanding how code works and knowing what search engine bots can and cannot read when it comes to your links you can greatly enhance or optimize your webpages for search engines.

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What is Search Engine Optimization?

What exactly is SEO or Search Engine Optimization and how does it impact your online presence? In it's simplest definition, it's basically the process of first selecting the most appropriate keyword(s) or keyword phrases you want your website or webpage to be recognized for, then subsequently structuring your website or pages so that this particular keyword phrase will ultimately appear in the search results if and when someone searches for that particular phrase. Confused? Hopefully this will make a little more sense as you read on.

The "essence" of SEO involves fine tuning or optimizing your website content (the text that is contained within your website's pages) along with the HTML and "Meta Tag" coding that doesn't necessarily appear for humans, but is fundamentally important to what your browser sees and how it interprets your content - this is called on-page SEO. It also involves an appropriate link strategy or methodology of applying anchor text links from pages within your site as well as links to and from other external sites which is called OFF-page SEO. The more links to your website from other relevant and topically related external sources, the more authority your site is considered to have for that topic.

The most popular search engines are obviously Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and AOL and there are a ton of other 2nd tier search engines as well (like 7search, searchfeed, enhance, kanoodle, to name just a few). Each and every one of these search engines protect their methods and ranking algorithms very highly as they obviously don't want to let out their secrets to people who might use this knowledge to "game" the search engines. It is in the absolute best interests of every search engine to always provide the most relevant information as possible when someone uses their search engine to look for information. Imagine if you used a search engine and no matter what term you searched for, you were presented with non-relevant junk. You'd likely never use that search engine again!

Having said that, every search engine takes into account a vast array of factors when determining what sites or pages appear at the top of their search engine listings. These factors and the weight each carries are in a constant state of flux - continually striving to improve their listing results. These algorithms differ so greatly between each search engine that often a webpage that ranks #1 in one particular search engine may rank #200 in another search engine.

Contrary to popular belief, new content or websites don't need to be "submitted" to search engines in order to be listed. One single back link from an already well established site will prompt the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider or examine its entire contents if structured properly. If no external links are present, it could take a few weeks or even months from the time a site is created for the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site. So, it definitely pays to have links to your new web property from other already established sites which are already being spidered. The higher the authority of the site you are getting a link from, the more weight that link carries, and the quicker you'll get indexed.

If all this doesn't make any sense at all and you have no ideas what the best keywords are to target for your particular website, there are TONS of 3rd party companies out there who would be more than happy to help you out, myself included.

Seeking for search engine marketing company that improves your search engine ranking? Look for Dougles Chan - The Search Engine Guru.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO, is the way of attracting more and more visitors to a website and thus increasing rank of the website. As its name suggests, search engine optimization is typically related with search engines. There are lots of search engines around the web. Google, Yahoo, Bing etc are some of the mostly used search engines. Suppose, you want to search about dental hospitals around the USA using Google. When you search you will notice that lots of links have appeared. There may be thousands or millions of websites related to dental hospitals around the USA. But it is not possible that all the websites appear in the first page. Usually for Google, ten links or websites appear in each page. You may wonder why it is important for a website to appear in the first few pages.

This is a fact that people tend to click on websites that appear in the first few pages. It is rare that a person will search about five hundred pages and then click on the link of your website there. So, websites that appear in the first few pages get most of the traffic. We all know that the more you get traffic the more you have the chance to shine in internet marketing. Internet marketing has become a global business now-a-days. So, it is highly important for you and for the growth of your business that your website appear in the first few pages.

Now the question may arise what you can do to place your website in the first few pages or, possibly, in the first page. Here the SEO works. The main objective of SEO is to optimize your sites in such a way that your website appear in the first few pages. So, we may say that the websites that are optimized well appear in the first page. There are some things to follow if you are to optimize your site well.

Firstly, the contents of your website should be relevant. You must have some idea how you can attract the visitors about a specific thing or product. Suppose, you want to sell electronic parts online. So, your website should contain adequate information about the electronic parts you intend to sell. Besides, the keywords should not be irrelevant. It often misleads people and they get irritated by this type of things. You need to create links to different high ranked websites and thus attract more and more visitors. It will help the rank of your website to grow up. Search engines can read only texts. So, it is better not to use images, video or flash player to describe about your product. However, what is most important is the title of your website. The title should be relevant to your business. It will increase the chance of being in the first page for your website. The URL of the website should not be too long to grasp. It should also be relevant with the business you want to enlarge.

These are the basics of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. If you are interested about SEO you need to learn about the pros and cons of SEO. Hope, the article will help you learn about search engine optimization and grow up your business.

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SEO: What Does It Mean?

If you're new to Internet Marketing you may have come across the term SEO. You've probably even wondered what it means and what it's about. Like you, I was quite bewildered by the term when I first begin to look at Internet Marketing as a way to make money online. In this brief article, I would like to give you some basics of SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization and the reason why it is so important to anyone doing business online.

What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization basically centers on keyword research. There are many different keyword analyzers that you can use to help you in this process. Google has a free keyword analyzer tool. Just do a search on Google to find it. In order to drive your website to the top of the page rankings, you have to use the right keywords and ultimately these keywords will drive the right traffic to your site in order for you to make sales. Without driving traffic to your site, the chances of you being successful are zero to none.

Strategic Placement of Keywords
It's important to place your keywords in strategic places throughout your site. Try putting keywords in your title tag of your post or webpages. Also, try to put them within the article/post about 3-6 times.

On-page Optimization, Off-page Optimization and Back Links
Two common terms that you will most likely encounter in Internet Marketing are on -page optimization and off-page optimization. The difference between the two can be summed up as follows: On-page optimization refers to things that you can do on your web page to better promote traffic to your site. An example would be keyword research, putting links in your articles optimizing your title tags, headlines, sub headlines within your article. Off- page optimization refers to things that you can do off your webpage to drive your page rankings and increase targeted visitor traffic to your website. An example of this would be building back links. The term back link basically happens when a link from another site links to your site. Back links are another way to build your sites search popularity. This can be done by using social bookmarking sites. Two such sites are Social Marker and Only Wire. Once set up, these sites will generally send your article to multiple sites with the click of your mouse.

SEO is very important to any successful internet business. Blending the right mix of on-site and off-site optimization, as well as evaluating, re-evaluating and utilizing the right mix should drive your SEO search rankings to the top.

An article by Scotts Digital -  Best SEO branding and search engine optimisation company in Singapore.

Do Alt and Title Attributes Help With SEO?

A highly talked about topic is the SEO world is, "Do Alt and Title Attributes Help with SEO?" Well to help shed a little light on this topic, I did some research and came up with a few good conclusions. I'm not suggesting these are 100% accurate but from my initial research they seem to be right on target. I welcome all other SEO experts to share their opinions on this topic by posting their comments - because as we all know, every little bit of information can help us all.

Well to start, I want to provide a brief introduction of each attribute to help you understand their "intended" purpose.

The alt attribute is, popularly and incorrectly referred to as an alt tag and is commonly misunderstood to provide a tool-tip for an image. Both of these are incorrect. First of all, the alt attribute is an attribute and not a tag. The alt attribute was always intended to provide alternative information about an element and is generally required for image and image maps and is not meant to be used to display a tool-tip. The alt attribute, can be used for the img, area, and input elements to help provide alternative information to users who cannot display that element in their browser. As an example, here is how you would define an alt attribute for an image: <img src="imagepath.gif" alt="this is our company logo">. If the image is not displayed the text, "this is our company logo" will be displayed in the place of the image.

The title attribute, on the other hand, is meant to provide additional information about an element, which is displayed as a tool-tip by most graphical browsers. The title attribute can be used to describe any HTML element except for base, basefont, head, html, meta, param, script, and title.
An excellent use for the title attribute is to provide descriptive text within an anchor tag to let the users know where the link will direct them if they click on it. When the user places their mouse over the link, it will display a small tool-tip displaying the title text that you've provided. An example would be

So as you can see the alt and title attributes have different purposes but how do they affect SEO? This is the true question we all want to know and understand. Do they help with SEO or are they simply ignored by the search engines? I tested several different scenarios, all in Google, and after my research I've come to the following conclusions.

Alt attributes seem to be picked up by Google, whether or not there was a link within that element. Some SEO experts have mentioned that if there is no link, then the alt attribute would not be indexed... from my research I've found this to be false.

Going further, I noticed in one testing scenario, if there was an image with an alt attribute and a link to a completely other site, that other site was also indexed by Google when searching for the text within the alt attribute. It was difficult for me to verify this multiple times but I definitely verified it in one testing scenario.

I also took this one step further and analyzed my results with what Google Images was displaying. I immediately noticed that Google sometimes takes the alt attribute text and provides this text as the description for the image in Google Images, something that is very valuable to know and understand when doing SEO for your website.

In all of my testing scenarios, the title attribute do not seem to be picked up by Google and adding a link to that element did not seem to affect this result at all. If you really think about it, this makes complete sense. Since you can place title attributes in almost every element of a website, it would be very easy for a user to affect the search engines by keyword stuffing throughout their web pages, something that Google and the other major players do not want, hence why title attributes do not help with SEO.

In my opinion, you should use the title attribute to help with your user's experience and not with SEO. Since tool-tips provide more useful information to the user about images, links, fields and much more, you will help your users to understand what is happening around the web page.
So from my testing I've determined that a title attribute is meant to provide tool-tips to the user for user experience, whereas the alt attribute is helpful in terms of providing alternative information to the user when their browser cannot display an image or input element and helping to increase the SEO of a website. My recommendation is to pay close attention to when, where and how you are using your alt attributes. If they help with SEO, then you should pay close attention to what you are adding.

When adding images always be sure to add an alt attribute to the code of each image. If you do not have one, then just specify a blank one, such as alt="". Also, be sure to add alternative text that is relevant to that image, the content on that page and be sure not to specify an alt attribute greater than 100 characters in length, as this may be perceived as spamming.

I hope you find my brief overview on the topic of, "Do Alt and Title Attributes Help with SEO?" to be beneficial for you and your business. I'm sure one could dive deep into this topic, spending weeks determining the differences between how Google, Yahoo! and the other major search engines handle title and alt attributes with regards to SEO for a website.

I welcome all comments and/or feedback.

A SEO article by Scotts Digital - Best digital branding agency and search engine optimisation companies in Singapore.