Would You Let A Dog Or A Butler Market Your Website?Written by Michael Cheney
The latest news to hit Internet's 'water cooler' is that Lycos and Ask Jeeves are to begin their own SEO services..Search engine optimisation (or SEO) is any practice related to end goal of improving your website’s positioning in search engines. The brief history of SEO is that it first started out solely as remit of developers themselves. This was back in day when one person designed, built, maintained, hosted and marketed a website. The Ever-Changing Internet Landscape During past few years, however, entire Internet industry has divided up into a myriad divisions to such an extent that SEO is now a booming sector in its own right. Entering term "seo" on Google returns nearly 20 million results! Now businesses recognise that it is no longer possible to expect one individual or company to possess all necessary skills ‘under one roof’ to be able to achieve great results on graphic design, technical construction AND marketing of their website. This has led to trend of bringing in specialist search engine marketing consultants or companies to assist. As Google and like are spending millions every year on developing their tools to accurately sift through billions of web pages that exist it really is a full time occupation just keeping track of what has an effect on search engine ranking and which strategies work best. Everyone Wants 'Organic' Nowadays! Ask Jeeves and Lycos are now offering their SEO service to help companies get found in ‘organic’ results of search engines. ‘Organic’ results are those results in a search engine listing that are non-paid. Almost all search engines now offer businesses shortcut of simply paying to get an ad listed whereas as a latest study indicates that only 28% of searchers will click on an advertisement as opposed to one of ‘organic’ results (on Google).
| | The 7 Points of Do-It-Yourself SEOWritten by Gordon Goodfellow
Ever felt intimidated at convoluted, jargon-ridden information about Internet marketing for small businesses available on Net? Ever been horrified by huge fees experts charge, putting search engine optimization beyond your own means? Ever thought: What exactly is search engine optimization anyway, and can I do it myself?The answer is: Yes, you can! The basics of search engine optimisation in applied web marketing are simple. It's all to do with keyword content of your text copy, and can be summarised in seven points. 1. Register a good domain name which reflects what your site is about. Even if you are an established business, don't register www.FredJones.com if you make widgets. Rather, you want to register something like www.BestWidgets.com because that would inspire confidence in people looking for quality widgets who would not necessarily have heard of Fred Jones widget-maker. 2. Name your page URLs based on reasons similar to above for your web promotion, except now you can be more specific. Search engines like to know what your page is about. Name a page after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm) or a service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm) on one of sales pages. 3. The text in title tag is crucial in letting search engines know what each page is about. Put your important keywords in your title tags, using both singular and plural versions (people will search for both) and make these tags different and specific for each page. For example, "Widgets and After Sales Widget Services". Whatever you do, don't call home page "Index", but treat it almost as a mini-description. 4. The other tags (at top of html page) between two "HEAD" tags are not as important as title tag, but description tag is still used by some search engines in displaying what you would like web users to see when they scroll down a page of search results. Some search engines don't use description tag at all; others, like Google, sometimes use part of it together with part of main body text surrounding prominent keywords on your page. So you may as well treat description tag seriously; make it brief (about 25 to 30 words) and as comprehensive as possible in short space allowed. Make sure you have your popular keywords included within your description tag. The ALT tag is used for a very short description of an image or graphic file, and is what is displayed if you allow your mouse pointer to hover above a graphic. These days it is not considered important for search engines. The COMMENT tag is never displayed on body page, and is used by coders and designers as an instruction or reminder to themselves about what that section of html coding should be doing; in past, some webmasters in their quest for website promotion and search engine ranking used to stuff keywords in comments tags, but now it is generally acknowledged that main search engines pay little or no attention to these.
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