Search Engine Optimization Overview

“Who here has ever Googled when they were looking to buy something locally?”

“Did you ever wonder how the Search Engines determine what will be listed number one and what will be listed on page 10 for any search”

“Can you see why it would be such a huge benefit for a business to be ranked number one for your search instead of on page 10.”

Toastmaster, Fellow Toastmaster, and guests today I am explain to you the exciting world of Search Engine Optimization

Put Simply, Search Engine Optimization is knowing how to work with the Search engine robots so that your website will be listed highly when your target audience types in something relevant to your website.

Search Engine Optimization exists because businesses pay web developers a lot of money for a nice looking website. More times than not the business believes that somehow, someway their future clients will find their website just dying to spend their money. Unfortunately the Search Engines differ from Field of Dreams and the philosophy of “if you build it they will come” does not work.

An optimized website needs to be written for two audiences. The human visitor and the search engine spiders. An optimized site will combine a number of different elements ranging from Keyword Rich text, inbound links from other websites, generate a sitemap, eliminate broken links, a full Cascading Style Sheet, and HTML Validation. These factors all play a role in where your site will appear among the listings.

The exact formula that Google and the other search engines use is unknown. Google does not want anyone to know their formula because than everyone would know how to get their own website ranked number one for any keyword. However, it is clear that these elements do play a contributing role and by optimizing these separate elements your website you can feel confident that your site will be listed for your desired keywords.

An important concept to understand is how Search Engines work. The big boys of Google, MSN, or Yahoo! all have the unenviable task of sorting through the entire Internet and figuring out what pages are relevant for words that are searched.

The spiders go from page to page, website to website, and do their best to put the entire Internet into their database. The spiders need our help though, and by working with them effectively you can get your website found when someone types in something relevant to your website.

The most important thing for these robots is the text on your website. An effective website will be loaded with words that your potential client will use to search for you. It is important that the website have Keywords in their Title Tags and use the keywords throughout each page. The most common title tag is “Homepage” and when you see this I can guarantee you that this site will never be found. Effectively you are competing with everyone else on the planet who has no idea what
they are doing when someone types in “home.”

It is also important to keep in mind that all these websites with beautiful pictures and fancy Flash documents mean nothing to the robots. Robots are stupid and they will have no way of knowing that beautiful photos of Europe are for selling tours. Bottom Line is if the robots do not know what your website is about, do not expect for the website to find you when your potential client searches for a phrase relevant to your website.

Inbound Links referring to your website are also important. The Spiders are constantly indexing the Internet and they hop from site to site. The Robots will be impressed when they are making their rounds of the internet and they are constantly finding other sites that are referring to yours. If you have several links coming into your website the search engines will think highly of your site and you will be listed highly when people type in relevant keywords.

An effective website will also eliminate all broken links. Broken Links are links that refer to sites that no longer exist. It is annoying for the visitor to your website, and to the Search Engine Robots. If you have too many of these broken links the robots will not think highly of your website, and your site will not appear highly when your desired keywords are searched.

Sitemaps are another important element. You want your visitor and the robots to have an easy time navigating through your site. The Sitemap is a page with a link to every other page of your website. This will help the human visitor find what they are looking for, and it will help the robots go through your page. By making it easy on the robots they will be able to go through your site and put more of your pages in their database. More pages in their database means more chances for your human visitor to find you through search engines.

Search Engine Robots also want to see that your website is up to today’s standards. Over the last two years the creation of websites has forever changed. In the good old days of 2005 you had to make changes for style one-by-one. If you had a website of 2,000 pages and one day you decided that you wanted Green Headlines instead of Blue you would have to go page-by-page, headline-by-headline for every headline. The invention of a Cascading Style Sheet has transformed this process and now you only need to make a slight change in one an external file and Voila you know have Green Headlines throughout the 2,000 Websites. This makes the technical code shorter for each webpage. The robots do not want to read pages and pages of HTML Code and by making this code much shorter the search engines will rank your site higher.

Another important element is HTML Validation. HTML Validation means that your website will work on every browser on every device from mobile phones to interactive television systems. The HTML Standards are set by the World Wide Web Consortium, and the robots will be able to read that a site is HTML Validated. Again this works for both audiences. Your human visitor will be able to access your site whether they are using their iPhone or their Wii and the robots will see that you know what you are doing.

Search Engine optimization is understanding how to make all these various elements work together. There is no magic formula, but unfortunatley it will not happen by accident. With an effective SEO Campaign you can make Google your salesperson.

SEO Raleigh, North Carolina/Search Engine Optimization Tel Aviv

The wonderful thing about computers is tht I will be able to host the SEO business Help Get Your Website Found.com in Raleigh, North Carolina or in Tel Aviv. For those of you reading my blog, my aim right now is to build up my keywords. As you can imagine Search Engine Optimization is competitive for a high ranking so it is to my advantage to put a geographical location on my title. A blog for me has been an effective resource because it has been indexed within the first week of being on Google while my wonderful website Help Get Your Website Found.com is still preparing itself for the day the lovely Google robots come back. The funny thing is my site was indexed the day I bought the URL but I had nothing up, know it still has a LOT of work to be done, but come one week I will have a beauty on my hands.

One Size Does Not Fit All with Search Engine Optimization SEO firms

It seems that a majority of the sites that pop up when searching Search Engine Optimization firms offer a tier system of pricing. Optimizing your website takes time and a wide degree of different skills. These SEO Companies are looking to give potential customers a large number of "services" that they will offer for their clients and just sign up now and get all these benefits. My company Help Get Your Website Found.com offers a unique package where we will give you a free analysis of your current website, and we will give you recommendations on how to improve your ranking. A true SEO plan takes time, effort, and each website presents a unique challenge. Different sites are going to generate a different number of links. At Help Get Your Website Found.com we recognize that businessmen have so many things going on at once, and dealing with SEO is easier to outsource than do in house. With our free analysis of your current website, we will also give you a free consultation of what steps you should make going forward in order to make your website as SEO friendly as possible. Just like you would check shoes to make sure it fits according to your needs, SEO is the same concept and you should understand what you are getting for your money before you sign a big contract.

Can Flash be indexed by the search engines?

Today a friend of mine asked me if I could make his Flash Website SEO Friendly. Flash may make your website unbelievably fancy, but at the end of the day it does not get indexed. Text is what the all-important robots view as the main criteria when they index your website. When you put a Flash Document that looks so impressive you are not playing the Google game. Start handing out fliers, advertise your website in the newspaper and television, and make sure you have a simple URL if you are a Flash "junkie." The best think is not to mess with Flash altogether, but if there is no other option make sure to add text to every page and make as many pages as possible.

Importance of Sitemaps

A web developer number one priority is to make your website nice and number two is disappear after they have received your check. A sitemap is a valuable tool for any optimized website. A sitemap may never be seen by a human eye, but your Search Engine Spider will love you for it. By providing a sitemap you are helping the Google Spiders do their job. Sitemaps will show every web page throughout your entire site, and by providing a sitemap you can help the spiders find sites that might otherwise be hidden. Also, another plus of it is seeing all your title tags in a convenient format. This provides an easy way for you to look at all the Title Tags throughout your site and evaluate the effectiveness.

Writing for Two Audiences

To all my loyal readers out there if you only take one lesson here it is: When writing up the text of your website understand that you are writing for your human page visitors and the robots that are indexing your website. It may sound confusing, but do not be deterred. This means that you need to know which keywords your target audience is searching for and use this specific phrase as many times in the text of the document.

Suppose you sell leaf blowers over the internet

This is rich SEO text
"Our electric leaf blowers and cordless leafblowers"

This is Poor SEO Text
"We carry a number of different options for your needs"

The search engines are going to pick up the SEO rich text (electric leaf blowers gets 30 searches a week and cordless leafblowers also gets 17) and when people type in these phrases you want to be make sure your name pops up. The poor SEO text may flow into the website better, but without using your keywords these Google robots are not going to find you.

One of the tools for good SEO is Wordtracker http://www.wordtracker.com/. As much as it pains me to give them a plug on my blog they accumulate data about what is being searched and this gives the SEO Expert valuable information about what data you need to use to make sure you are targeting your audience as much as possible.

Importance to Links

Imagine you live in New York City and everyone tells you that you need to go to this bakery. The butcher tells you, the mailman tells you, your kid's teacher tells you, and you finally end up going to the bakery. The fact that other people speak so highly of it is going to make you think highly of the market. As you can imagine the bakery is always busy and they have several returning customers. If that seems like an elementary example, imagine Google doing the same thing with links.

Google robots have a lot of work to do considering the fact that they index the entire Internet. It is not an easy job, so they are constantly looking for advice and asking sites where they should go. If you have an inbound link to your website from a legit site (example does not work with link farms) the Google robots will keep finding your site and they will keep indexing you. Eventually these robots will figure out that with so many inbound links to this site the robots will think highly of you and give you a higher PageRank which will result in a higher search engine ranking.

Links are the most tedious part of the entire SEO process, but they are essential. The effort it takes to find someone who can give you an inbound link and than "judgment day" to see whether or not this complete stranger agrees to do you a small favor. On top of everything links are hard to track because Google will show you a different number of inbound links when you hit your PageRank and go down to Backward Links or when you track it with Google Webmaster Tools. There is a reason why their are SEO professionals out there (Coach Rosenberg) being one of them, and here may be one of the better times to outsource. With so many frauds (like our buddies who are into link farms) and easy mistakes to make I would recommend just having a professional do it. Another analogy for link building is that it is like a plumber, it looks easy but you know there are too many things that could go wrong to risk doing it yourself.

SEO Expert vs. Opportunist

When someone says they know their stuff concerning Search Engine Optimization there always a good reason to be suspicious. With SEO being a new field there is a lot of BS around, and they are just looking to pray on potential clients that know less about SEO than they do. These opportunist talk big, but there results are minimal.

When "SEO Firms" Offer this run away:
1) Submission into Thousands of Different Search Engines
--My services at Help Get Your Website Found include 130 Search Engine Submissions which account for 98% of the world's search engine traffic. The Opportunist may like throwing out big numbers, but how important can submission to 1,870 different search engines be if it only accounts for 2% of world traffic.
2) Links to Millions of Other Sites Instantly
--If step one is useless, this step is dangerous. Having credible links to your website that also follow Google guidelines will cause your raise your PageRank and your Google listings. However, if you link with a million of these random websites overnight chances are that they are garbage. If Google sees you getting links from these useless sites chances are they will lower your ranking and hurt your rankings. Listings are good, but only if they are kosher.

3) Directory Listings in some insane number
-- Directory Listings are important for inbound links, and they can be a nice way of generating more traffic. To get listed in 10 site specific to you and your website However, when a site tells you that they are going to post 1,000 directory entries it might as well be 45,000,000. These numbers are useless and unless they can tell you where you are listed, how these directories will be beneficial to your inbound links, and if they submit them individually or by just sending a mass spam e-mail to all these "directory editors."

4) A set hour amount for your job
--Finally the people who can do every SEO Job in a set number of hours. One SEO firm says that if you pay them $8,000 they will devout someone to your website for 756 hours. WOW. SEO takes time and effort, but it does not take 756 hours. This is a process and each site has different focuses in regards to SEO effectiveness and my guess is a firm that touts itself as "SEO Experts" are not necessarily able to tell into the future.

Why SEO is Important

When you type a generic term describing your business in Google you want to be the first one who pops up, right? Whether you are selling baseball cards from your garage, running a moving business in Omaha, or just a company who wants to brand their company logo as much as possible. The world of marketing has changed, and the reality is if you want your business to grow you must evolve with it. Having a web site is not enough anymore, and you need to make sure that you are doing everything possible for your website to be found by your targeted clients. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of getting your website listed as high as possible in the search keywords that you are targeting. Look at the example of the baseball card shop, if they are in the top 10 of Google when someone types in "Buy Baseball Cards" imagine how much that can do for their business. Getting your website listed within the top 10 of keywords is to understand the importance of SEO and how to use it to your advantage. Appearing high in these listings has little to do with luck, and more and more with knowing how to optimize your website until it is SEO Friendly.