Back In Time To The Advent Of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As long as the Internet has been around, it has remained a mystery to the mainstream public how Web sites are listed at the top of search engine results. There are many theories of how search engines and search engine optimization (SEO) initially began.

The 1990s

Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill, created the first “search” program in 1990 called Archie (still in use today), to archive Web documents. The following year, Gopher started at the University of Minnesota, and this is when the concept of search engines began. In 1993, Matthew Gray created the World Wide Web Wanderer, the earliest known search engine robot that assists with ranking Web sites. But search engines as we use them today were born in 1994. In that same year, Galaxy, Lycos and Yahoo! were all started, two of which are still widely popular search engines today.

Yahoo! was among the first to implement SEO techniques, even though at the time they were unaware of the potential growth the industry would soon have at the turn of the century. Yahoo! Founders David Filo and Jerry Yang were trying to get their site seen by others on the Internet by giving it more exposure. Some excellent structure and tricky hand-coding, their site became more available for new visitors. They were not questioned about ethical business practices because nobody was sure what was considered ethical or unethical – there were simply no standards in place yet.

As the initial search engines were cataloging the early Internet, many business owners soon learned to appreciate the value of their Web site being listed in the search engines, as they first saw increases in visitors to their Web sites. They began submitting their URLs on a continuous basis, and changed their sites to support the needs of search engine robots. SEO companies started showing up, when they began experimenting with the concept of search engine optimization, with the emphasis initially on the submission process alone. Soon afterwards, the first automatic submission software was released, and it was then the notion of Spam came into existence.

The 2000s

SEO professionals have been seen in a negative light over the last five years, due in part because in early 2001, enthusiastic webmasters quickly realized they could overwhelm search engine result pages by over submitting Web sites. Unfortunately, as the Internet industry developed, search engines quickly became cautious of new SEO companies attempting to generate visitors for their clients at any cost, however unfair or unethical. Tactics such as keyword spamming, doorway pages, cloaking, and hidden white text placed on white backgrounds proved too much for the search engines to tolerate. As a result, the search engines replied with numerous countermeasures, created to filter out any techniques considered spam. That is good news, although it forced ethical SEO companies to start using more subtle techniques to assist their clients Web sites with obtaining rankings in the engines.

The “big 3” search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo!, have recently come to the realization that SEO as an industry is here to stay, and to maintain effective results, they needed to accept the industry, even embrace it, and engines eventually partnered with successful, ethical SEO companies to establish typical standards for fair and ethical optimization. This is important to help keep information relevant and beneficial to visitors while still being unbiased to people who create the content on their Web sites.

The Current State of SEO

Today, there are major differences in how search engines work and how to get ranked in them. With the assistance of proper search engine optimization, Web sites can now have a equal fighting chance of obtaining high rankings. Because SEO is a highly specialized trade that requires both technical skills and business marketing knowledge, it is only through the combination of these two skills that one can properly implement SEO techniques to obtain high search engine rankings. Many SEO specialists have since now realized it is “search engines or bust.”

Wendy Suto is president of Search Circus, a Web site marketing firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. She keeps pace with the latest optimization, link building and article submission tactics. Before becoming an SEO consultant, Wendy was a computer instructor for a wide range of businesses, including Gateway Computers. As a certified SEO consultant, she teaches SEO training classes in Cleveland, Ohio.
wendy@searchcircus.com
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5 Tricks In Choosing The Right Keyword

Regardless of whatever online business model you have established, you will need traffic. And the best way to generate traffic is through the implementation of sound Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

Central in every SEO campaign is the selection of the right keyword or key phrase to focus on. This is a very integral part of the process. Make a mistake with this area, and your online business can potentially crumble into obscurity.

How do you select the right keyword or key phrases for your traffic generation tactics? Here are 5 vital considerations you should keep in mind:

1. Choose a keyword that has a high demand. How can you establish this? Simply determine the number of times a particular keyword has been searched for by internet users all over the world. You can do this by using the free tools at www.inventory.yahoo.com or www.nichebot.com . Just type in the keyword you have in mind, and results of related keywords and key phrases will appear, as well as the number of times they have been searched for within a certain period. Overture has been bought by Yahoo, so more or less, you’d have a great barometer of a keyword’s demand through the stats provided by one of the internet’s most widely used search engine. You will want to choose keywords that have high number of searches.

2. Choose a keyword that is being catered to by fewer websites. Each website that is devoted to the keyword you are considering is your competition. The fewer the competition you will have, the more successful you will be in securing the market attached to such a keyword. Internet marketing, after all, still follows the basic rule of business, which is taken from the basic rule of economics: low supply plus high demand equals to a highly profitable industry. If you’ll be one of only a few enterprises catering to a particular keyword, then you’d have better chances of generating traffic from the same.

3. Choose a keyword that fetches a number of relevant ads. If you’re enrolled with Google AdSense, you can run a search of the said keyword at www.google.com . On the results page, notice the row of links on the right side. These are PPC ads. They are, more or less, the same ads that will appear on your own web pages if you’d decide to use the same keyword. As a rule, choose the keyword that fetches at least 5 relevant ads. This is to ensure a higher Click Through Rate (CTR) for your PPC campaigns. You wouldn’t want non-relevant ads to populate your web pages, otherwise, your CTR will terribly suffer.

4. Choose a keyword that has a high Cost Per Click (CPC). This is especially true if your business is involved with Pay Per Click (PPC) models like the ones that are enrolled with Google AdSense, AdBrite and Yahoo Advertising. A high CPC will ensure bigger profits for you. PPC programs pay you every time a visitor of yours will click on a particular ad that is displayed in your pages. If the CPC is high, you’d receive more per click. How can you know the going rate for some keywords? You can try to make a search at www.adsensearena.com and the corresponding CPC for quite a number of keywords will appear. Or you can try Overture’s tool, found at http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm/search/tools/bidtool , to determine the bidding price for certain keywords.

5. Choose a keyword or a key phrase that are used by people who have the mindset to buy. Determining this is quite easy. Casual internet users who are only looking for certain bits of information during their free time usually use one or two words for their search terms. But people who are ready and willing to buy something usually type in three or more words as their search term. Hence, it can prove to be more profitable to focus of keywords or key phrases composed of three or more words so that you’d be able to attract such a market.

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SEO-Down and Dirty

Search Engine Optimization is something you should consider before submitting your website to the search engines. A well optimized website can bring lots of visitors to your website from the search engines. SEO is the process of modifying your web page to get better rankings with the search engines. One thing you should consider is how to use meta tags and keywords, although this is not as important as it used to be. If possible it is best if you use your top keywords in your domain name. Then you should provide content and meta tags based on your top keywords.

More important than meta tags is writing great content using your most important keywords prominently throughout your web site. Visitors who read great content will link to your web site and recommend it to others. Put alternative text in your graphic images that clearly describe the graphic image and using your keywords whenever possible. Do not put text in a graphic image that has nothing to do with your web page. Do not spam the search engines because they can and will permanently delete your web pages from their indexes if you go too far. Examples of spam include keyword stacking and stuffing, refreshing your web pages too quickly, using invisible text or text that is too small. Use the same color text on your page as the page's background color. This has often been used to keyword stuff a web page. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Some consider it optional, however, it's not a bad idea to create your meta keywords tag content by copying the important search terms from the meta description tag and separating each term with a comma. For example, "wholesale widget, skinny red widgets, industrial red widgets, large widgets, large aluminum widgets, custom widgets, wholesale widget distributor". Use the meta-tag description and meta-tag keywords attribute on every page of your site that you want the search engines to index. We recommend that you include 1-2 of your most important keyword phrases in the title tag, BUT be careful not to just list keywords. If you just list keywords you risk being viewed as spamming the engines, which can ultimately lead to you being blacklisted by the search engines. Your title tag should include your keyword phrases while remaining as close to a readable sentence as possible to avoid any problems. Include 3-4 of your most important keyword phrases. Especially those used in your title tag and page copy. Don't forget plurals. For example, a travel site might have both "caribbean vacation" and "caribbean vacations" in their keyword meta tag to make sure they show up in both searches. If you know of a common misspelling of a popular keyword that could be used to find your site you should enter it in your keywords meta tag. For example, a travel site might use "caribean " in their keyword meta since it s a common misspelling for "caribbean".

Be sure to use the keyword phrases that you also used in the copy of your page, title tag, meta description, and other tags. Do not use multiple instances of the same tag. For example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam. Do not use any keywords in your keywords meta tag that do not directly relate to the content of your page. Always ensure that whatever terms you place in your Meta keyword tag also appear in the body of copy. You do not want to be considered a spammer. The only exception that can be made here is for common misspellings of a word. They can add a small boost to your Internet traffic, as not everyone was a spelling bee champion in grade school. Make sure you accurately describe the content of your page while trying to entice visitors to click on your listing. Include 3-4 of your most important keyword phrases. Especially those used in your Title tag and page copy. Each page of your site should have it's own title tag with it's own keywords that related to the page that it appears on.

After you have optimized your website you should consider your link popularity, or the number of sites that link to your site. You can increase your popularity by finding linking partners. You exchange links with another website to increase your popularity. You should link with other websites that have content that is relevant to your website. For example, if your website is about “work at home” then you should seek linking partners that are about “work at home” or whatever your keywords might be. Inbound links go a long way to increasing your popularity with the search engines. Before you can start looking for linking partners you need to get a links page for your website. Then you can go to a search engine and type in your keywords. Generally, the pages that come up in your search will be likely candidates for you to link with, but you don’t want to link with your competitors. Potential websites you might link with should contain information relevant to your web site and reach an audience who would be interested in your web site.

Patricia Bradford is the CEO of http://hotworkathome.com/, a Work At Home Directory.
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SEO Manual Directory Submission

The art of directory submission involves submitting a page or a website to numerous different online directories; examples of online directories include the yellow pages and Google directory. The aim of directory submission is to create an enhanced exposure for a web site, business or a service ..Usually the more directories which have been submitted to ends up attracting more visitors due to the enhanced exposure to potential visitors.

If a person does not want to go through the time consuming process of submitting their web site into directories themselves, they have two options, one is SEO manual directory submission and the other is automatic directory submission. There are many distinct differences between the two, each with advantages and disadvantages; we will talk more about each one in this article. The person must decide which is best suited to them and/or their service.

Automatic Submission

Automatic submission involves downloading a piece of software which will automatically post your web site or service to multiple directories quickly. Alternatively you can pay someone to do this for you; there are many web sites and companies on the internet offering to do this for you at a nominal price. The advantages of automatic directory submission are that it will save the submitter a lot of time compared to manual submission processes and services. Also automatic submission services are much cheaper in comparison to people offering a manual directory submission, especially if you want the added extra of SEO aspects to the submission. The disadvantages of automatic submission services are that they are usually much poorer quality than manual submission; automatically submitted web sites into directories are much less likely to be ranked and indexed Automatic submission software’s are also very unreliable which can have the end result of many important directories being bypassed. I would especially not pay for an automatic submission software or service.

Manual Submission

Manual submission involves visiting every directory one by one and submitting your web site or services manually over and over again. There are many people and companies who will take the hassle of this process away from you and do it on your behalf for a fee. The advantages of manual submission is that the directory entries will be of much higher quality and have a greater result of being accepted and indexed, which in turn will give you a higher quality and number of visitors. Also with manual submission you have much more control over which directories to insert into, therefore you can target any potential niches. Disadvantages of manual directory submission are that it is extremely tiresome and time consuming; also it can be much more expensive than automatic directory submission.

In conclusion, if you are looking for quality above everything else, SEO manual directory submission’s services are for you. It ‘s all about the individual’s needs and choices, some just want to get fast, instant exposure at a budget, which is why they go for automatic submission. But for people who want quality and lasting results, there is no option except for SEO manual directory submission.


Article Source: http://www.ArticleStreet.com/

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There is No One Right Way in SEO

The term SEO, or search engine optimization, is still an unknown to virtually everyone who doesn't work in that field. Most people have never even heard of the term nor know what it refers to. But the more interesting part is that even within the SEO industry, not everyone agrees on how best to approach the problems SEO sets out to solve.

There are of course the basic guidelines: lots of content on site, properly formed meta tags, get inbound links, give outbound links appropriately, and strong site organization. But the reason SEO continues to be more of an art than a scientific method is because there is no one way to accomplish these things. Exactly how much content does a site need, and how many times does a keyword need to be on a page? How many inbound links do I need and how do I get them? Are paid links ok? Are comment links ok? What makes a good title tag? A good h1 tag? Am I doing anything else wrong that will hurt my rankings?

Most professional SEO providers will provide their client a level of detailed in-depth report similar to one another. But that's where much of the similarity ends. While most will not have any outright conflicting advise, their content and their approach will be different. If you polled 10 providers for reports, you'd likely get 10 different versions.

This makes the industry exciting for the SEO organizations. It makes performing SEO well a challenge, not just a standard checklist that you can use. No magical software to plug the site into and get all the right answers. Every site is different. Every day at work is different. And not to mention the suspense of not knowing immediately if it is working. An SEO provider gets no grade except improved rankings and traffic for the client, which take time to build and fluctuate daily.

The mystery of SEO also makes it hard on a layman though. It is nearly impossible to perform truly stellar SEO work to your own site, because the finesse it requires only comes with volumes of clients under your belt. Further it makes it harder for a layman to choose an SEO provider, and to know if the changes his SEO wants him to do are right answers. It requires a leap of faith and at least a basic understanding of SEO to dive into it.

SEO Moves, Inc. performs specialised SEO for select businesses in ambitious industries. Now with a presence in Australia, they are an SEO company that continues to take on the most difficult of ranking challenges. Visit them at www.SEOmoves.com

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