Search Engine Optimization for NewbiesWritten by Mario Sanchez
80 percent of web surfers start their journey on a search engine. There are close to four billion pages indexed in major search engines. While search engines are not (and should not be) only way to promote your business online, it is one of most important. If you have a small business website, and you want to rank well, there are a few things you need to do. First, don't think that users will search for your site for your company name. If, for example, you have a website design firm in Dallas, you should try to rank high when somebody searches for "web design dallas", or "web design company dallas". These phrases are known as "keywords", and they are first thing you must define (even before you start designing your website). There are several ways to choose right keywords. When choosing them, remember to make sure that they are terms that search engine users actually use, or you may end up ranking high for search terms that nobody uses. For some tips on chosing right keywords you can check out my article at http://www.theinternetdigest.net/archive/keywordoptimization.html . The next question is, how do search engines know that your page is relevant to your chosen keywords? The answer is twofold: 1) They rely on your page copy: If your keywords, and other related terms, are mentioned frequently on your web page, your relevance for those words will increase (don't overdo it, though, or search engines will treat is as spam). For more information on how to optimize your page's copy for search engines, you can check out my article: http://www.theinternetdigest.net/archive/web-page-optimization.html .
| | When to NOT hire a SEO and whyWritten by Zoran Makrevski
When you get an e-mail from SEO Company with content similar to this:"We submit your site on X00.000 search engines and directories…" Stay far away from companies which offer you to submit your site on thousands of directories and search engines. Why? What they do is: they use submission software and advanced scripts and they submit your site to different guest books, local search engines, search engines in other languages, post your URL in comments in different Blogs, FFA etc…You will not have any benefit from this. FFA stands for Free For All, pages which are designed to carry a designated amount of links on each page. Have in mind that when comes to link popularity relevancy counts and links form this pages will not going to help you much. Add to this that FFA pages have very limited life span, you will get picture. When some SEO company claims that they can guarantee #1 on Google Why? No one can guarantee #1 on any Search Engine! (Except owner of course) I can guarantee you first place in search results in my Greek Business Directory, since I am owner, but there is no chance that ethical and honest SEO company will give you such a guarantee in real life. Even biggest companies in SEO industry do not give such a guarantee. There are companies who claim that if they don’t achieve specific number of top 10 positions, you get your money back. Take even this with great caution, and be sure to read their guarantee 2 times, including small letters on bottom (if there are any). Many of them will attempt to propose you non competitive phrases, which will give you no traffic and therefore you will have no benefit from this. When SEO Company offers you to get paid on base on delivered traffic (Though THEIR domain) Why? Many SEO Companies offer to prospective client’s deals on base on delivered traffic. This traffic to be measured easily, they propose new domain, or sub domain to be created, optimized and to deliver traffic though this domain. Be sure to ask which property will be that domain or sub domain. If SEO Company told you that domain will be their property, your site will not be optimized. Here is what will follow: SEO Company will register domain name on THEIR name, and will optimize that domain for your keywords. They will redirect all traffic from that domain to your site.
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