Google Search Engine Optimization

Seach Engine Optimization

Whether you are a web designer, web programmer, marketing specialist, or just a business owner. Your goal is to have you web site reach the top of the search engine listings. To do so you must know how search engines rank web sites in their index. Knowing how this happens gives you a great advantage over others who know nothing about search engine optimization. Basically search engine optimization is a process you go through to make sure that your web site is spider friendly and easily indexable. In this article we will mainly be discussing Google's search engine and there are two ways to get your site to the top of Google's list.

The first way is paid advertising with Google AdWords. This is the quickest way to get your web site at the top of Google's listing and on multiple other pages that are sponsored by Google AdSense but you are going to pay for this service. There are two ways to pay for this type of service and that is Pay Per Click (PPC) or Pay Per Impressions (PPI). This means you can pay a fee every time someone clicks on your link, or you can pay a fee for every thousand times you add shows up on another web site. The positive aspects about AdWords is that Google's network allows you to really focus on your market group specifically. If you have a business that only services a specific city then there is no reason that your add should be showing up on websites people are viewing from another country. You can really just focus on your specific niche and your clicks will be more likely to turn into sales or leads which give your a better ROI. The downfall to AdWords is that you are in a constant bidding war with other advertisers for that ad space. In AdWords you type in your daily budget for a specific ad and then how much you are willing to pay per click for that add. Lets say you are willing to pay $0.25 per click but your competitor is willing to pay $0.50 per click, well his add wins out over yours and his will show up higher in the listing than yours. So not only is it a constant battle but your competitors can easily knock your ad to the second or third page by simply bidding higher than you. You can also purchase different packages that teach you how to effectivly optimize your website for search engines. Brad Callen's SEO Elite, WP SEO Sniper, and SEO One Way Links are just a few of those programs.

The second way to get your web site to the top of Google's search is called Natural Listing. Natural listing is based on many different things in Google's algorithm and it ranks your site by how popular Google sees it to be. There are many things you can do to get your site in on natural listings. First submit your site to as many search engines are you can because most of them are free and it can never hurt. This allows different search engines to know about your site and allow their spiders to crawl across it and discover the different pages. A lot of search engines, mainly google, offer free webmaster tools for you to use. I highly recommend this because it gives you the ability to upload a site map that tells the specific search engine where all your pages are located. There should be a link to every page you want indexed somewhere on your page. A site map helps search engines to locate pages that they might have trouble with ordinarily, such as database driven web sites and some more complicated web programming.

There are somethings you can do to help spiders index your page properly and first is to have a good title tag on every page. A good title tag helps the spiders find out what you page is about so make sure you include some important keywords in your title tag. Next thing you want to do is include some h1 and h2 tags in the body of your pages. You also want to include some important keywords between your h1 and h2 tags so that the spiders will pick these up too. The great thing now with CSS you can make an h1 and h2 to tag look any way you want it to look and you are not bound by the large bold text of the h1 and h2 tags. Back in the day meta tags where what you used to define keywords on your website, but people to often where over loading their meta tags with to many keywords and search engines put very little weight into meta tags if any.

Part of Google's main algorithm for ranking websites is how many people link back to your website. The more people you have linking back to your website the better because it makes you seem more reliable. There are two types of links when it comes to the internet. There is the one way link, where Bob's web site links to my web site but I do not link back to Bob's. Then there is the two way link, where Bob's web site links to my web site and I link my site back to Bob's web site. Google looks more favorable on one way links to websites because your site looks more popular if everyone is linking to it. There are a few tricks to get your website out there and have people link back to it.

Participate in Help Forums by searching for forums that relate to your website. Read the forums and participate with constructive comments or help answer someones problem or question. When you join these forums most of them give you a signature field where you can add a little information about yourself. Here is where you put your name and your web address. Now use a little common sense here and don't make your signature an advertisement because you will most likely be banned from the forum. But if you really help out and contribute to the forum it is a great way to get your web site out there.

Write Free Articles for different websites with free information. Everyone is on the internet looking for free information so if you happen to have a site about balloon animals then write some articles about balloon animals and submit it to free websites. Websites that publish free articles will give you a little about the author tag that goes at the bottom of every article you write and they publish and this is where you include a little bit about yourself and your web address. Again this is more free advertising for your website. When you sign up for these free article websites you agree to let anyone download and reuse your article somewhere else as long as your author box stays with it. So if you write a great article about being creative with balloon animals your 5 download your article and use it in their newsletter or on their website that is 5 more links you have back to yours.

So are you getting excited about this whole advertising thing yet. I know I am!

Participate in Blogs as much as you can about your specific topic. This is one of my favorite things to do because I love getting into discussion with people about different things so search the internet and find blogs about your topic, trust me you will find them. Then read a couple blogs and comment on what was written in the blog. Now the big thing here is please contribute real information to the blog and not just an "I Agree" statement. If your comment is just obviously there just to get your link displayed most blog admins will block you from posting which will only hurt your cause. Most blog sites allow you to type your name your email and them your comment and when your comment is posted your name becomes a link to your website. So blogs are another great way to get your web site out there.

You SHOULD NOT spam blog websites or spam any other website for them matter just to get your name out there because you will be blocked. Another big tip you should NEVER do is something that was done a while back and that is hidden text. A lot of people use to make a section of text on their site the same color as there background then they would just throw as many keywords in that hidden text as they could and as many times as they could. All search engines have picked up on this unfair trick and will not block you and remove your site from their listings should they catch you doing this.

So everyone just use some common sense in how to get your website out there for people to see. Be creative but the ethical about it because as I said before no one likes a spammer. Play around with different suggestions and see what works for your and what doesn't.