Useful and simple SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO is the single concept that gives the most confusion to a beginner in internet marketing. Just what is SEO?

SEO refers to methods and tools you utilize in order for your website to land in the top of major search engine results. Usually internet users enter keywords in their search and they would only click those web sites listed in the first page of search engine results. Most never look beyond page 2 of those results. Ranking at the top of the search engines therefore increases the number of people who will visit your site.

In looking for information, product or service, most internet users use any one of the major commercial search engines like Yahoo!, MSN and Google to navigate the web. Therefore traffic from search engines plays a big role in your revenue and ultimately, in the long-term sustainability of your online business.

This is why most online companies would employ the services of SEO consultants to make their website optimized for the search engines to improve the volume and quality of traffic to their site.

Though search engine optimization is one useful strategy in traffic generation, care must be observed in selecting your SEO consultant. There are the wrong types of SEO consultants who employ all sorts of overt manipulation and deceptive practices. This may lead to disaster when ultimately your website will be removed or banned from the search engines.

Basic SEO

What are the basic SEO methods an ordinary website owner can employ? By understanding how the search engine works, a website owner can begin to address the technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing your site.

The leading commercial search engines use crawlers or robots to find web pages. These crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Webpages being crawled would depend on their distance from the root directory of a site. Hence it is a good practice to structure your site such that all web pages are not more than three clicks away from the homepage.

Since the search engine robots can only read texts, using flash movies and images will not contribute to a higher ranking for your website.

Using frames in a web page will only confuse the search engine crawlers and should be avoided as much as possible.

On the other hand, the use of meta tags like the title and description tags in your web pages can make the the job of the crawlers easier and may result in frequent indexing of your site in the search engines.

Lastly, you should however take note of one useful reminder. Though very effective SEO methods should be never be relied upon entirely to generate traffic to your site. This is because search engines change the algorithms for ranking pages any time with the result that your current methods may no longer work. Hence it is still a useful strategy not to be overly dependent on the search engines for free traffic.

The Useful Strategy Research Team