However, in order to maintain your ranking, you have to keep on top of what's happening in the rapidly changing search engine industry. The rules that affected your page rank yesterday may be meaningless tomorrow!
With the rapid growth of the Internet, it is no doubt why search engine optimization has become one of the hottest topics within Internet or affiliate marketing. The amount of daily search engine traffic is staggering, and profitable to those to take advantage of it. For an individual or company who is thinking of marketing their products or services online, the Internet can be a virtually limitless gold mine of potential customers at a relatively very low acquisition cost.
However, to reach these customers you will need to position yourself on those same search engines that so many people are using daily looking for your services or products. When queried, a search engine will reveal all of the web sites that it has in its database about a particular subject or product. If your web site happens to fall into the requested search category, this is called your web site or page ranking. However, usually only the first few (top 10) ranked websites get to reap the sweet fruit of profit and victory over their competition.
However, the search engine industry is continually evolving.
You need to know which of the major "players" is powering the smaller search engines if you want to know where you should focus your optimization efforts.
Not only do you want to get more traffic, you want to get more unique traffic! In order to achieve this, you need to create multiple streams of traffic for your site. Settling for one source of traffic is simply not enough for most small to mid-size sites, or home-based business sites.
Considering the competition most people experience with Search engines, not to mention the ever-increasing trend towards ‘pay for inclusion’ with the major search engines, it can be a real challenge to get decent traffic from Search engines.
Your web site could be anywhere between 1 to 1000 on a particular search engine for a particular search term or keyword. Some search engines will reveal thousands of web pages on a search topic, but when a web site is developed with search engine rankings in mind and the goal to appear in the first few results of certain search keywords, it is called search engine optimization or (SEO).
Some company specialize in SEO and offer their services for optimizing your website with a guarantee of producing top rankings for your keywords in the major search engines. For the past couple of years, the major search engines have been preparing to square off against each other and battle it out for the industry's top spot.
Google is still extremely powerful with Yahoo! a close runner-up and MSN still a distant but threatening third.
However Google and Yahoo! power many of the smaller search engines plus some paid listings.
You need to be aware of these changes if you want to gear your optimization efforts toward the engines that will send you as much traffic as possible.
Of course, you also need to keep tabs on changes to the search engines themselves!
Before you can actually begin to start optimizing a web site, you must understand how search engines and their spiders or robots work. This information will give you a head start on the process of building an optimized web site.
Almost daily, we meet web designers that do not truly understand the function of search engines. This usually results in poorly developed web sites in regards to search engine placement that usually disappear among the millions of websites on the Internet, never to be seen by people that do not know the owners. Sure, anyone can build a web site with a little practice. However, knowing how search engines work and building a web site that meets their ever-changing ranking criteria and achieves top ranking results for relevant search terms is quite different.
There presently exist two types of major search engines, robot or spider indexed and human indexed. It is important to understand the differences between the two because the way they index pages will dramatically affect your sites position within them.
The main idea of web site optimization is about getting ranked on search engines. So, it has nothing to do with how fancy your web site looks or getting ranked in the last few pages. This is where the page rank plays an important part for which seo is an important criteria.
Obviously it is important to have a practical and easy navigation system and favorable looks, so that you can maintain the visitors you receive form the search engines, but those all come to play after the page rank. After all, no rankings, no new visitors. About 95% of the search engines on the Internet are self-indexing or spider robot indexed. The other 5% are human indexed and are usually referred to as directories.
At this point, the important point to learn is that human indexed search engines cannot be manipulated and optimized for, as freely as a spider index search engine can. You cannot optimize your web site for human indexed search engines in the same way that you would for a spider index one. The good news is that with the advancements in the robot indexed search engines and their algorithms, they are getting closer and closer to human indexed search engines.
Search engines can only display what was fed to them from an information standpoint. How this information is ‘fed’ to the search engine is where some of the major differences come into play. One used to be in total control of what search engines index form their website, but with the ever growing search engine robots, that is almost an improper statement. Nowadays, one needs to develop a website presuming the search engines can see each and every single section of it and will take everything they see into account when they are ranking the website.
Search engines will simply keep on producing traffic forever once your site has been indexed. The problem is getting a good placement (first page) on good keywords and gets lots of searches. This is not always easy, especially if you are in a competitive field. Even if you have a poor search engine placement, you will still get some traffic, however, a poor placement will result in very poor traffic flow.
Search engines frequently change the algorithms they use for page ranks and for ranking sites. They don't want unscrupulous site owners manipulating their indexing methods in order to get high rankings. By doing so, they damage the integrity of free search!
As soon as the search engines become aware of a trick being used by "search engine spammers" to boost their site ranking, they figure out a way to catch them. So be careful! You don't want to catch yourself employing a "great strategy" promoted by a marketing affiliater or "expert," only to find out it's a tactic the search engines hate! That could get you booted off their listings in no time flat.
The truth is, the site probably is located on most of the search engines that the URL was sent to, through the submission software. However the problem is that the pages are ranked so poorly that even the inquisitive eye of the owner cant finds them. Most of the time, a search for any particular topic will result in at least a few thousand responses, many of which are actually ranking at the top since they are optimized, not just by luck.
Most web surfers will not look past the first page of search results, sometimes even the first half of the first page. Nobody is going to sit there and view hundreds of pages deep into a search just to find a website providing the service or product one is looking for. Regardless of how poorly the site has been optimized, the domain name (URL) will be indexed in most search engines. Because of URL indexing, many people think their site is going to rank well also, which is not a true statement.
In almost every case, search engines will be able to return a web site address when asked. This means that if you were to go to a major search engine and type in your site name, you will probably see it right on top of that search engines results. Because of this, many people think that their site has achieved great search engine ranking.
After all, it’s number one! But this is not the case. Don’t be deceived by this type of search engine response. If you ask a search engine to show you the web site that belongs to any site name, it should definitely not have any problems in returning the favor. However Search engines categorize sites based on keywords, and visitors search for websites using keywords not the website URL. In fact, if a visitor knew wanted to know about a particular URL, they would type it in their browser address bar, rather than the query box of a search engine.
Bottom line, most search engines will be able to return the correct URL address for any web site if asked to, provided the website was indexed by them. This does not mean that the site is ranking well. I often see site owners and web site builders try to use this example proving their already great presence and implying that not too much work is needed from our firm to get them better results, since they are "already ranking". They will say oh yes, we are ranked - number one in fact! They will go to Yahoo.com and in the search box they will type in their URL address and try to use it as proof to their statement.
These days, fortunately Google has started paying attention to more than just what is on the website being indexed
Once again, if someone searches for your domain name, it should pop right up on most search engines. In fact, if this does not happen, that means your Internet presence has some fundamental deficiencies
To be successfully ranked on a search engine means your web site must achieve a favorable position over others based on a scale such as the keyword used for the search.
To achieve top ranking is to be at the very top of the search engine results page or SERP for a search term, above all other competitors. In order to do this, you must compare your position to theirs on a search term specific to your industry. A term that hundreds if not thousands are using on a daily basis to find what you offer on your website or through your website. You can't search for your own domain name or URL, and take it as being ranked well. You are the only one with that domain name; of course you would be ranking for that if you were in the index.
Lastly – how important are the smaller search engines?
There are many benefits to the smaller search engines, but the most significant are that you get indexed more quickly, have fewer competitors, and can generate a solid amount of traffic for you. The huge engines (Google, Lycos, inktomi) and indices (Yahoo, DMOZ) can take weeks to add your site, if ever, and always put your site against 1000’s of others.
While there is no guarantee that you will be included in a smaller search engine, you will be spidered’ much more quickly. And while they may not have gargantuan amount of searches a day, there is no difference between 1000 visitors coming from 1 source (say Google) and 1000 visitors coming from 5 sources (200 from each of several smaller engines). An additional benefit of the smaller search engines is that some (not all) have agreements with the main engines so that their content is spidered by the main engines - in essence giving the webmaster a ‘backdoor’ into the main engines.
Mentioned is a good link – it basically covers most aspects which are essential for Search Engine Optimization. There are more links, but this should suffice
http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html
As mentioned earlier, the search engine industry is continually evolving and it is difficult to put the entire process into one article. It would take a couple of pages to go about each phase and for those interested in hard-core SEO, it is better to get hold of a book or a much more detailed article source.
So, basically, just use the above to get a brief idea on how and where you should focus your efforts on search engine optimization.
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