How Search Engines Work
Search engine optimization is one of the most cost-effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. This means that, as a business owner, its important to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the user initiating a search.
They use programs called ‘spiders’ to index websites. This spider is an automated program that crawls a website, reads the content on the it and follows the links that the site connects to. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository where the data is indexed. It will visit each link listed on the website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so its not recommended to have a website with more than 500 pages.
The Eternal Domain Age Problem
So you’ve bought your website building software, figured out how it works, built a website to target your chosen niche, and added what you consider to be quality content. You’ve worked hard to get this far, but this is just the beginning. You need to get your site seen by as many people as possible. You need to drive as much traffic as you can whether it be through a pay-per-click campaign or via organic traffic.
Let’s say you decide to target organic traffic. In order to do this, you need to get a high ranking in the search engines for words or phrases related to your niche. Hopefully before you began building your website, you used researching tools to figure out the best words or phrases to use. Your entire website, from headings to meta-tags, to meta-descriptions and anchor text has been optimized for these words. continue reading…
Effective Anchor Text To Improve Rankings
The ‘anchor text’ is the keyword or key phrase you use when linking from some another website to your own. This is the hyperlinked text that is visible to the human eye. In order to improve your Google search engine rankings, make sure you also focus on which anchor texts you are using when building links back to your website.
To see an example of how powerful this anchor text is, go to Google and do a search for the phrase “click here”. At the time of this writing, there are over 1 billion results when searching for that phrase. It would be almost impossible to get anywhere near the top of those results. This spot is currently held by the adobe site, due to the fact that many websites have linked to the adobe site with the phrase “click here”.
Link Building In The Social Age
Search engine optimization is a fast-paced environment with a constantly changing landscape. Ten or so years ago, the right meta-tags and proper use of ‘keyword stuffing’ might just have been enough to send a website on its way to ranking well. However, the ever-improving sophistication of the search engines and their ongoing battle with website owners has seen more than just a few movements of the proverbial goalposts.
At the heart of contemporary thinking is the importance of building quality, trusted links that can act almost like academic citations to identify which websites merit credibility and deserve to rank for a given keyword phrase. At the same time, the explosion of the social web has led to a rise in the number of different marketing opportunities online, both in terms of building links and raising your profile.
Automating Your Website Traffic with SEO
Search engine optimization is often seen as the staple of Internet marketing – and for good reason. A well-optimized site that performs under targeted key phrases in the major search engines will generate traffic around the clock for no marginal cost – that is to say, unlike PPC, there’s no cost payable for each additional visitor that lands on the website.
While it’s not quite free traffic (given the expense of getting the website visible in the first place and the ongoing costs of maintaining its ranking), it’s probably one of the closest things to it that you can strive for as a website or business owner.
Imagine the following scenario: A retailer of widgets has an ecommerce site selling widgets of all varieties and descriptions. They can either spend $1000 a month driving PPC traffic to their landing page or $1000 a month on SEO – which do you think would be more effective?
