Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Of all the Internet marketing techniques around, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the most important to the success of your online business. However, SEO is also the hardest technique to get right, with so many different possibilities and competitors around.
Despite this, learning the basics of SEO are quite straightforward, and even the simplest techniques can enhance your online business prospects. If you are new to Internet marketing and want to know more about Search Engine Optimisation, then here are some of the most common SEO techniques to get you started.
Search engine spiders
Search engine spiders are a big part of search engine optimisation, and you need to know about what they do if you are to be a successful Internet marketer.
Spiders are designed to read a site’s content. If a spider finds a link it will document it and go through all links and content until it can go as far as it can. Basically, if a site exists then a spider will find it in the end. You can use any site that you already have well spidered as a linking to link to a new site. This will get the site recognised and start generating exposure.
However, more and more search engines are using spiders less, as they hope you will sign up for their Pay-per-click advertising programs. Despite this, getting your site spidered in a network with other successful sites will help improve your traffic and search engine optimisation.
Keywords
Perhaps the simplest and most effective search engine optimisation method is the use of keywords and phrases in your web site content. Once you have gotten into the search engines through submission and spidering, you need to make sure that your content stands out and is easily picked up by people searching for specific words. This is where keywords and keyword phrases come in.
You need to work out exactly what your web site is about, and then make sure that words relating to this topic are regularly included in the content. The keywords associated with your site should appear in the title, description and main copy of each page.
A good range of keyword density is between 7 and 9%, depending on how competitive the market you are in and what sort of information you are putting out. You need to make sure that your keyword ranking is good when you first launch your site, as this will help to push up your search engine optimisation success.
Google Page Rank
As the biggest search engine around, Google plays an important part in search engine optimisation. One of the most important features of Google is its page ranking score. In addition to your general keyword content, you need to make sure you are rated high in the Google page rank score in order to get your site recognised.
The rank goes from 0 up to 10, and evaluates how well your page relates to other pages in terms of relevance. If you have some well ranked pages linked to your site, then your page rank will definitely improve. However, getting a good page rank from Google is difficult, as it will be assigned a value as soon as it is spidered.
If your site is not in good shape then, you could find yourself further down the order than you want to start with, and it can be hard to get out away from this low rank without serious work. However, if you persevere with your search engine optimisation techniques then your Google page rank will improve, along with your online business success.
