Search Engine Optimization Overview
Why is it Important?
Search engines are the number one way that internet users find
websites. In most cases, a listing in a search engine is free. So, it's no
surprise that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often the first
priority when marketing a website. Proper search engine optimization
can bring you hundreds--possibly thousands--of visitors every day,
and at no cost to you. It isn't easy to get a top listing--it could take
months of tweaking and waiting--but it is certainly worth it.
Throughout the next few pages, I'm going to outline to you some tips
and tricks I have used through out the past year to achieve top
ranking within the search engines. Let it be clear that it isn't magic, it
does take time and great effort, but if you follow these clear guidelines
you will instantly increase your odds of achieving a top ranking within
the major search engines such as Yahoo, Google and MSN.
Links are Everything
Other SEO guides talk about the importance of titles, meta tags, text
concentration, etc. This is important, but there's something much
more important: links.
Google is by far the most popular search engine, and the main factor
in a site's rank is the number (and quality) of links from other sites to
it. If your website has no inbound links, it is unlikely that you will even
show up in Google's listings. Google isn't the only search engine
looking at links; most do to some extent, but Google places the largest
weight on it.
Google uses an algorithm called "PageRank" (PR) to determine how
popular a site is on the internet. You can read how it's calculated in
the original research paper, but here are the basics:
· Every webpage gets a number from 0 to 10 (with decimals). 0
means that the page is not currently ranked, possibly banned or
the page may not exist, and 10 is hugely popular (there are
about 25 pages on the entire internet with a 10).
· The scale is logarithmic. This means that twice as many links will
not give you twice the PageRank. In fact, moving from one
number to the next could take five or ten times as many links.