Understanding Search Engines

What is SEO?

You are probably seeing the phrase SEO a lot more often these days. It stands for Search Engine OptimizationA Search Engine provides a service for surfers to search for businesses, products or information. SEO allows search engines to find your site within it's free listings also known as Natural Listings., in plain text it's a list of rules to follow to make a web site "searchable" or building the site to be able to be easily listed within search engines. With more and more web sites being launched on a daily basis the idea to be listed at the top of searches becomes much more difficult. Our team of SEO experts can help you rank higher in popular search results with Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Lycos, HotBot and AOL just to name a few, but it takes a lot of patience and tedious work.

What are Meta Tags?

Meta Tags are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. It basically tells search engine spiders what the content of your page is and why they should crawl your page. There are rumors that by having meta tags you will have top listings on search engines, as good as that sounds, not everyone can be at the top, but it can sure help your rankings.

Below is an example of a meta tags, you are welcome to copy and paste the code below into your own header tag of your page, just remember to change the red text.

<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Your name/company">
<META NAME="Title" CONTENT="Your web page title goes here">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="word1, word2, word3, phrase to find your site">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your web page description goes here.">
<META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="last-modified" CONTENT="2009/07/15">
<META NAME="revisit-after" content="10_days">

How do Search Engines work?

How do crawler-based search engines such as (Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Hotpot, AOL, Ask.com etc) go about determining relevancy? Especially when there are literally hundreds of millions of web pages to search through? There is an algorithm all search engines use, some search engines have a more powerful algorithm to follow for more accurate searches. Each one works differently and it is kept extremely trade secret. Not to mention, almost every month algorithms are changed slightly so no one is able to "catch on" to their crawlers. Although, there are some general rules to follow which we have called our "Ten Search Engine Optimization Rules" which you can read below.

Ten Search Engine Optimization Rules

Great Content - If you are not the "great communicator", pay to have it written. A great copywriter can write the pages for you and turn your site into a trustworthy link source.

Site Navigation - Make sure your site is easy to follow and understand, have links to every page.

Link Popularity - Trade links with those sites that have a higher page rank, it's just like high school… Popular people are more widely known.

Correct page titles - People try to put something different in the title of the page then what's really on the page, this will only hurt you. Be as specific as you can.

Correct Descriptions - Each page should have descriptive keywords. Look for a certain niche rather than trying to hit every search.

Links to and from your site will be checked - Link to sites that compliment your site without directly competing. 3-way links help avoid this. Avoid links that have nothing to do with your business.

Be cautious what you say in your links - Google has a new filter in place for sites that are using keyword links. An example of this: if you have a link called "organic foods" use "all natural foods" instead. But you also want to use different variations for the same site. Don't let all the sites that link to you use the exact link name.

Page Title - It used to be that the title index of your page was heavily used by search engines to determine your search index, this does not count as much as it used to.

Meta tags - Search engines used to use meta tags heavily in the past, but not much anymore. They are still helpful, just not as important as they used to be.

Content, content, content - Search engines are now able to read up to 500 words on each page of your site, the first 25 words are the most important. Don't repeat keywords too often on a page; do not use them excessively through links on your page and not in each alt tag.

Here is what you should absolutely avoid doing:

Hidden text or links

Cloaked page

Deceptive redirects

Misleading or repeated words

Page does not match search engines descriptions

Doorway pages

Duplicate site or pages