What Newbies Need to Know About SEO

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What Newbies Need to Know About SEO - By: Luat Tran Van, Posted on: 2008-03-26

You can either be a newbie or a seasoned veteran to internet marketing. Whichever category you fall into SEO will have a major impact on whether you survive online or not. You can ask anyone that is familiar with online success and they will confirm that they use principals of SEO to bring traffic to their sites. They know that traffic brings customers which will eventually increase their sales. If you also want success online, you will need to learn about SEO and how to implement it into your internet marketing.

SEO - Art and Science

SEO is used so frequently online that many don’t know that it is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. That is the process which internet marketers use to build content on their sites to make it more relevant to the search engine queries by their target markets. Websites that have better optimized their sites with content for search engines typically are placed higher in the results of queries.

If you have a website which sells dinner ware which is optimized, it should earn a placement in the results of search engine queries for dinner ware or table ware. If you have done an exceptional job with the optimization you may even have placement for more general terms such as kitchen products. The end results are dependent on the SEO efforts made by the owner of the site to achieve higher placement in search engine results.

Explaining the Results Page

Every time that you use a search engine such as Google, MSN or Yahoo to query the search engines will return search results. The results page will contain many links with descriptions to sites the search engine feels are relevant to the query you just entered.

Take a closer look at the results page. As an example if you queried Web Directory on Google you will see that it returns about 127 million hits. Google is telling you that you could visit these 127 million pages and find information related to that query. However the odds are you will not have the patience needed to do that, but you will check through the results on the first page and possibly continue to see the results on the second or third pages. This is why anyone familiar with marketing on the internet will tell you that being on that first page of organic search results is priceless.

The question is how to get a site on the first page of results. Links are listed according to their relevance to search queries. The more relevant the search engine feels your site is to a query, the higher it will place on search results. To appear higher in search results takes good SEO practices.

What are Good SEO and Bad SEO

Sometimes internet marketing newbies feel they can trick search engines into ranking them higher in search results. They do this by simply filling their site content with targeted keywords thinking that will get them there.
It s a fortunate thing for web surfers and an unfortunate thing for newbies, that excessive things like this can be very harmful to a website. The same can also be said about attempts at SEO. There have been many attempts in the past to get higher rankings by inserting key words into site content and key sections of websites in an attempt to trick search engines. This is referred to as key word stuffing which offers little value and often confuses visitors with text which makes no sense. If you write an article to appear on your site which has keywords taking up 40% of the text, your readers will be confused with ridiculous wording and your attempts will appear desperate.

How to Implement SEO

The concept of SEO is a pretty simple one. Take keywords and key phrases which relate to your websites niche, then use them in sensible ways within your sites content to allow search engines to see the relevance of your site to your niche. It takes much more than just placing a couple of key words within a few paragraphs of text. Search engines have developed algorithms to spot well written, quality content vs. the keyword stuffed article through internal and external linking structures around the content. You need the relevant content and you need popularity for that content.

How does a newbie achieve this? It really comes down to research. You should know the keywords used in search engine queries that your site appears in and those that bring visitors to your website. An extension of this is which of these actually end in a conversion or sale. Examine the keywords and find the ones you need to use within your content to zero in on your target audience. Make sure that you have content which is real, honest and offers quality information. This method and directory submissions will bring links to that content and make your site more relevant.

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