Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
This guide to search engine optimization will give you the information you
need in order to help you achieve high search engine rankings for your web site.
There are thousands of web sites all competing for the same search terms or keywords.
Unfortunately, if your site does not have high search engine rankings or even
worse, not ranked at all, no one will ever find you. If you are looking for quick
little search engine optimization secrets that will propel your web site to the
top of the search engine rankings, you will not find them here! What we will
show you is a systematic approach to search engine optimization that will greatly
improve your chances of success.
No Magic Formula to Getting High Search Engine Rankings: Focus on Content
As we stated in the introduction, there are no secrets for achieving high search
engine rankings. You can, however, greatly improve your chances of success by
taking a systematic approach to search engine optimization. That being said,
the most important determining factor toward achieving high search engine rankings
is your content. When we say content, we are referring to text and links, not
images. Search engines are large databases that gather text and links from web
pages and classify them according to certain criteria. The people who design and
run search engines are interested in providing links to the most relevant information
for their users. Ideally, they would like to give high search engine rankings
to those who have quality content that is relevant to the search terms or keywords
entered by their users. So our number one piece of advice is give the search engines
what they want: good relevant content!
This may seem obvious, but often overlooked in many search engine optimization
guides. Concentrate on developing good and compelling content and lots of it!
Lets look at an example. Lets say that you run an on-line art gallery. You
hire a web site design company to create a web site that allows people to browse
pictures of the art and purchase them using an on-line shopping cart. Your web
site design firm has created a visually attractive site. They have made an earnest
attempt at achieving high search engine rankings by strategically placing meta-tag
keywords (We will explain meta-tags and keywords in great detail later in this
article). Unfortunately, their attempts at search engine optimization failed;
your web site did not even rank in the top one hundred listing of the various
search engines!
So what went wrong? The web site was mostly made up of images with a title
and description of the paintings. Remember, the search engines can only index
text content and links so to the search engine, you beautiful art gallery was
just a bunch of short snippets of text like “Title of work: Summer Rain” and “Description:
Summer rain is a painting the evokes the many pleasant emotions and experiences
associated with a cool summer’s rain”. Obviously, scanty amounts of text like
that will not get you high search engine rankings on search terms such as “ On-line
art gallery”. But what about the meta-tag keywords, you might ask, didn’t they
help? The answer is no. Keywords only help with search engine optimization if
they are also contained within the text of the page.
So in this example, what would be the best way of achieving high search engine
rankings? The first step would be to develop pages with text content that would
be of interest to the visitor of the on-line gallery. You could, for example,
add pages describing each artist and profiling their work in detail. You could
also add articles about how to evaluate art, care for your art and so on. The
main thing this content will do, of course, is add value and character to your
site. It also provides lots of relevant text for the search engines to optimize.
Once you have developed your content, you can now concentrate on fine-tuning it
in order to achieve high search engine rankings.
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