Search engine optimization or SEO

How? How can I optimize my website so that it gets listed in the various search engines with a good ranking? This question is often asked, and here at SEO How? we'll be helping you to answer that very question and to provide you with the tools, the tips and the tricks to make this a reality.

An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization:

Our aim here is to provide you, the webmaster, with the knowledge that you require to begin optimizing your website so that it will be search engine friendly.

Is the following True OR or is it False?

If you submit your website automatically to 500,000 search engines than you will have more traffic than you can handle at your website!

SORRY, but this just isn't true, it just doesn't happen!

To achieve a high ranking in the MAJOR search engines, and receiving traffic from this positioning as a result, is a somewhat complicated, and needless to say, a time consuming activity. The bulk of targeted traffic comes from these MAJOR search engines, so your aim is to achieve a high ranking for your website in each of these engines. It takes a good deal of work and dedication to make this happen, but having said that, the end results can be very rewarding from both a satisfaction and a financial viewpoint. Our aim is to summarize the concepts of search engine optimization of your website in order to help you along your way.

Hopefully, we all know what search engines are and how they are used. Go to Google and enter some search words, and Google will find web sites matching the criteria you entered.

If you have a commercial website, you can see the potential in using search engines as a means of getting traffic to your website. From this point of view, search engines are an extremely powerful marketing aid, that you can use to drive TARGETED traffic to your website.

The initial mistake most new webmasters make is to submit their website to the search engines without optimizing their web pages. In order to optimize your web pages, you must have full control over the source code of the web pages. If you are using a service that generates the pages for you, the only information you are able to optimize is the data that you are providing to that service. This is a far less than ideal situation, but some webmasters may have to live with it. If, at all possible, you should take control of your source code, and then you have the means for managing your own destiny.

Search engine optimization of a web page is a detailed, lengthy process that cannot be covered completely in a single page introduction. The main clues here are "research, research, research" and "knowledge, knowledge, knowledge" in order to learn how to optimize your website pages.

Our aim here is to provide you with the most crucial tips, in order to get you on your way, and to prevent you from making serious, if not fatal mistakes, in the process.

What are the most important things to optimize on your webpage?

• the meta tags
• the content
• both the meta tags and the content
• nothing

The answer is that both meta tags and content require your attention. The most important of these is the optimization of your content.

Review your web site content and look for creative ways to strategically add into your content the keywords which you wish to target. For example, if you are targeting the keyword "graphic art", you will want to ensure that the phrase "graphic art" appears frequently within your site's content. The more it appears, the greater your chances are of being listed high in a search engine. Having said that, a word of warning, the better search engines examine context and relevancy, and excessive use of your keyword can flag your site as a "keyword spammer". This can result in your website being knocked out of the search engine's index. So, ensure you do this within reason, your website has been built primarily to be read by humans and not by search engines. A good litmus test is that if you are aware of the keywords when you are reading the copy than you are probably spamming those keywords.

What keywords to use?

Now that's the $64,000 question which only you can answer. You are the person who knows the most about your website, and who you are trying to attract to visit your site. The keywords you select should be targeted and narrow, rather than general and broad.

For example, rather than using the broad search term, "graphic art", try using a less searched for, but a more targeted keyword like "graphic art training". Even though narrow, targeted keywords get searched for less, you will be competing with fewer websites for the top positions in the search engines, and, as a result will end up with a higher position under that keyword and more traffic in the final analysis. That is not to say that you shouldn't try to gain a top position with your broader search term, but you must use your own judgement as to the amount of time, effort and money you are prepared to expend to achieve this.

An extremely useful tool to assist you in selecting your keywords is the Keyword Selector Tool at the Overture Search Engine. The tool enables you to type in a broad search term, and it suggests narrow search terms based on real searches made within the past month.

Meta tags have become of less importance in recent times due to the prevelance of key word spamming in this area. Most of the modern search engines, and especially the largest, Google, now focus more upon the content of your page as a guide to relevancy rather than upon your meta tags. It is still not a bad idea to optimize your meta tags with good descriptions and keywords, but you must remember, that even more important than this, is your content optimization. Whilst Google places a low priority on the use of meta tags as a guide to relevancy, some other popular search engines still use them to varying degrees. Meta tags are the html tags in between <head> tags of your html.

For example:

<title>Your Website Title</title>
<meta content="Your website description" name="description">
<meta content="Your Keywords go here" name="keywords">
<meta content="Your name, title" name="author">

Note:

In the above example the <title> tag is a description of your site that will usually appear on the browser taskbar at the top of most browsers. This description should accurately describe your site, but it should also be rich with your most important keywords.

In the <meta name="description"> tag, you will want to include a short description of your web site. This may appear as your description when you appear in the search results of some search engines. While this description should be rich in your targeted keywords, it should more importantly accurately describe your site. If you write a description optimized with keywords that doesn't make sense to humans, you run the risk of no one clicking through to your website.

The <meta name="keywords"> tag is where you will type your targeted keywords, separated by commas.

In the <meta name="author"> tag, you can include a short description about yourself as the author e.g. your name and title or something similar.

What is link popularity?

The other major optimization tip to use is that of link popularity. Currently this is a major factor in achieving a high ranking at Google. Google is by far the most widely used search engine on the internet and accounts for something in the order of 45% of all searches. It is recommended that you should initially focus on optimizing your website pages for Google.

Link popularity has to do with how many other pages there are on the web with links to your pages. The more pages linking to you, and the greater the link popularity of the pages linking to you, the greater your link popularity will become. A crucial factor in this equation is that of relevancy. If Google can find an appropriate level of associated relevancy between you site and the linking site than indeed, your page rank will increase.

Many webmasters believe that this problem can be solved by simply submitting their website to thousands of Free For All (FFA) link sites (commonly called "link farms") and although this will have the result of instantly having thousands of websites linking to their website, the unfortunate truth is that Google and most other search engines can recognize and ignore the links to your site which reside on these types of sites. Indeed, it has been discussed in some depth in various forums that this technique may even harm the page rank of the website submitted. The point is that it is an entire waste of your time and effort in submitting to these types of sites.

What can help my link popularity?

Submit your site to all the major web directories. These sites are maintained by teams of editors, and therefore have credibility in the eyes of the search engines, which results in high page rank and link popularity ratings.

The following are all free submissions:
The Open Directory Project (ODP) DMoz. This directory is used by Google and others as the backbone of their search engines.
The Google Directory is directly powered by DMoz.
Find the most appropriate topic site at the About.com directory and submit your website by sending a friendly email to that topic's guide.

Also submit your website to each of these easy and free submission Page Ranked directories.

The following are paid submission directories:
Submit at Yahoo! Directory, submission review is $299.00USD (annual renewal applies)
Submit at Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory, submission fee is $49.00USD (annual renewal applies)
Submit at GoGuides Directory, $69.95USD lifetime fee.
Submit using the LookSmart Directory's Cost per Click (CPC) model.

The development of relationships with other relevant websites is another way to increase your website's link popularity. Locate other websites that you would like to be linked to and swap links with the webmaster. This can be done by either creating a special links page on your website or by placing the link on a relevant page within your site. The other website does the same, and this helps build both sites link popularity. The usual warning applies here, use this technique judiciously, and don't swap links with totally irrelevant sites just for the sake of achieving a link swap.

There are many other optimization tips and tricks that can be used, and the more of these you master and use, the better are your chances of ranking higher in the search engines. Achieving a high search engine ranking can become somewhat of an obsession, so remember, there are many other advertising methods that can be used to promote your website.

After you have finished your optimization, you are now ready to submit to the search engines. The important thing to remember is that although there are thousands upon thousands of search engines on the net only a handful are of any real significance. These are the major search engines, and they account for approximately 95% of all search engine traffic. So, it is obvious that you should focus on getting listed on the major engines, rather than the multitude of small ones that only account for 5% of all search engine traffic. Having said that, you can ignore the automated search engine submission tools that are out there. Submit your website manually to the major engines. An added benefit of submitting manually is that you can be sure that the submission has been successful. Google has only recently put in place a mechanism to check automated submissions, and who knows where this may lead in the longer term.

Who are the top search engines?

These number only 10, they power thousands of other search engines and account for about 95% of all search engine traffic

Of these 10, only 4 account for 90% of all search engine traffic. These are, in order of importance:
1) Google, with, at the last report a whopping 46.2% of all search engine traffic. Submission to google is free and can be done here. Google also have a paid advertising feature called Adwords.
2) YAHOO Search with 22.5% of all internet search traffic is powered by its Overture directory. You can add your website to the Yahoo Search Website area here. You will need to have a registered YAHOO ID to be able to do this.
3) MSN Search with 12.6% of all search traffic is primarily powered by the Overture directory which is owned by Yahoo. You can add your website for free to MSN Search here.
4) AOL Search with 5.4% of all search engine traffic is powered by DMoz and Google paid and free listings. The result of this is that if you are on DMoz or Google, than you will be on AOL Search.

In general there is no need to spend your money on paid submission engines.

The major advantage with paid submission engines is that there is usually far less competition on them because of the fact they aren't free. If you are willing to pay, you can achieve a top placed listing. However, you can use this tip to get on the paid submission engines for free. Find a website already listed on these engines and ask them to place a link to your site on their website (you may have to provide a link swap to achieve this). Then, when the search engine spider crawls the website, your link will be found, and the spider will visit your site, and hopefully add it to their index. This should work, but the only certain way to get listed in the paid submission search engines is to pay their fees.

In conclusion:

After your initial optimization and submission, you need to return to your website pages, and tune them over a period of time. This will be a continuous, ongoing thing, as over time, the search engine algorithms change, and you must be prepared to respond to these changes in order to retain, or improve, your position in the rankings.