However there are 4 common myths that may be detrimental to your understanding of the whole Search Engine Optimisation process.

Some of the approaches that used to be effective before may no longer be useful today, since the market and search engine crawlers are smarter. Let’s debunk some of the basic myths and make the necessary improvements in your site to boost sales for long.

Myth #1 : SEO Involves Techniques That Fool Search Engines

Fooling search engines mean that you are also fooling human users.

Real SEO techniques involve more than just optimizing content, using marketing schemes and getting additional links. A number of tactics can be used depending on the people that you are attracting to your site.

Some of the useful strategies that can be used for SEO to last a long time may also include: competitive analysis, search marketing strategy, keyword analysis, web design, user experience, creative copy writing, ongoing link building, HTML code optimization, ongoing content development, web analytics and conversion analysis.

Myth #2 : Search Engines Aren’t Used That Much

Based on research, around 4.9 billion searches are done every month by 133 million unique searchers.

Search engines have become one of the most common tools used for people to gain information. The majority of internet users rely on search engines to get to different web sites, pages and companies. Search engines lead you to different online businesses and shops where you can find the information or product that you need.

You need to determine how useful and relevant your content is in the market, then aim on becoming an authority in the industry.

Myth #3 : SEO Doesn’t Work Because You Do Not Have Many Visitors

Keep in mind that SEO doesn’t promise instant and significant results.

You have to use the different marketing tools and strategies together with the approaches and SEO to make everything work together. Experts recommend that you spend about 6 months after the implementation phase to evaluate the results of SEO.

You also have to ensure that your web site can back up all the methods you have incorporated. If your site is not easy to navigate, does not have sound and unique content and is not relevant to the people you are targeting, then your SEO efforts will be rendered useless.

Myth #4 : SEO Happens Only Once

SEO takes time to develop and you need to evaluate and assess each approach to determine if it should be improved. Search engines view about 100 to 200 factors or signals to know its relevance as well as decide how to categorized search results. You have to give SEO constant attention because there are several other sites and pages that also promise unique content, entertaining media and other tools to entice the target market.

Always brainstorm on how you can further improve your techniques like integrating with other offline and online marketing, creating new content, building new links and refining your optimization approaches. If you have spent some time, money and effort creating the groundwork for your SEO, you have to ensure that operations continue to function and drive the right clients into your web site. SEO is not a one – time event. It needs to be refined every now and then, weekly is best.

Conclusion

SEO is an ongoing process that takes time and dedication to develop. You don’t have to believe everything that is written on SEO, but some of the essentials remain.

One of those essentials is getting quality backlinks to your site.

If you can write a simple article to distribute to article directories on the internet, then you can start building your own backlinks without effort in a very short space of time.

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Article may be reproduced with permission by www.surefireweb.com so long as all links are intact and a direct link back this this article is mainatained.

Practicing SEO means getting your website to rank top in the organic search engine result “for a particular keyword phrase” so as to get endless flow of free traffic to your website.

Imagine if you sell gifts, and you rank #1 in Google’s search result for “buy cheap Christmas presents”. What can that do to your sales?

Different search engines have different search algorithm. In the SEO industry, we are mainly concerned about getting top ranking in Google because Googles owns more than 80% of the search engine market share.

Notice that I quote the phrase “for a particular keyword phrase”? Before you even think about SEO, you must first know what keyword phrase you want to get your web page to ranked for. This is why keyword research and backlinks to your website are vitally important.

How to get your website rank top for a particular keyword phrase in Google?

Technically, you can get any web page (not just website) into the first page of Google by building lots of backlinks to that web page using THAT particular keyword phrase as the anchor text.

For example, if you want to rank top for the keyword phrase “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you need to have lots of backlinks to your web page using “buy cheap Christmas presents” as the anchor text.

By the way, do you notice that I always use the word “web page” instead of “website”?

Google views every web page as independent content, meaning technically, if you have a website about dog, you can add a web page about stomach pain and get that web page to rank top for stomach pain, even though your website is about dog!

Don’t agree? Just look at Wikipedia.com and Ezinearticles.com. They have articles in all kinds of categories. But almost all of them are ranking well in Google.

Other important factors besides backlinks

Technically, it is possible to bulldoze your way to the first page of Google simply by building enormous amount of SEO backlinks to your web page, disregarding all other SEO factors. But you really need enormous amount of backlinks, probably 100 times more than your closest competitor.

Think of SEO as a scoring system. If you don’t practice all other SEO techniques and simply build SEO backlinks, it will be as if you score 0 for all other fields on the score card and to beat your competitors, your backlink score alone has to be higher than your competitors’ total score.

On the other hand, if you score well on ‘other SEO factors’ at the same time, you don’t have to build that many backlinks. And the ‘other SEO factors’ are definitely easier to accomplish than link building.

The “other SEO factors” are:

#1 – The title tag

In a html source code, a title tag looks something like this:

<title>Title of your web page</title>

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you must include “buy cheap Christmas presents” in the title tag, as near to the starting line as possible.

#2 – Keywords in the description meta tag

In a html source code, a description meta tag looks something like this:

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your Description About The Page.”>

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you must include “buy cheap Christmas presents” in the description meta tag, as near to the starting line as possible.

#3 – Keywords in the url

The best is to have a website named buycheapChristmaspresents.com. But if you have many keywords to optimize, buying a domain name for each of them can be very costly. If so, you should at least name the web page as yourdomain.com/buy-cheap-Christmas-presents.html

#4 – Keywords within the content

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, try to include “buy cheap Christmas presents” at least once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph and a few within the content.

There is no strict rule on this but minimally, you should include the exact keyword at least once in the entire content.

#5 – Website authority

If you have been reading up on SEO, you must have heard of Authority Site. The idea is if your site is an Authority Site, the search engine will send tons of traffic for all kinds of keyword phrases to you, pretty much like what Wikipedia and Ezinearticles have established now.

Website authority is at domain level. Meaning if your domain is an authority site, all other web pages in this domain will benefit.

2 important factors that affect website authority are:

1) The age of the site

There is nothing you can do with the age of your site. You just have to be patience, and you need to have a long term vision for your website. Don’t build one site, chuck it away after 3 months and start another one.

2) The amount of backlinks to the homepage and internal pages, especially backlinks from other authority sites.

The difference between SEO backlinks (as discussed earlier) and backlinks for site authority (as mentioned here) is that the former is keyword specific, i.e., you have to include the keywords in the anchor text. For backlinks to boost site authority, any dofollow backlink will count. They can be keyword-specific anchor link or simply a URL link. Of course, all the SEO backlinks that you’ve established will help to boost your site authority.

Don’t just rely on ezArticleLink system. Try to build more backlinks, at least to the homepage, using other link building strategies. (For a detailed list of other link building methods, read this.)

Fundamentally, that’s all you need to know about SEO. I’m serious! Armed with these basic knowledge, I already gained hundreds of top positions in Google.

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Article Courtesy of EZLinkArticleSystem.

Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages appear attractive to the search engines.

The better optimized a website is, the higher the ranking it will receive from a search engines web crawlers, the higher its ranking the more traffic your website will have, the more traffic your website has the more profit your website will be able to generate.

The key is good internet search engine optimization.

Why is having a high ranking so important to the future success of your online business?

Studies have shown that consumers seldom look at websites that don’t rank a spot on of the first two pages the search engines displays.

Websites that receive a ranking that places them on the second page (or any other pages after that) see a significantly lower amount of traffic at their websites then one that is ranked on the second page. There is even a staggering difference between the first and second page. In the world of e-commerce, ranking and strong search engine optimization is everything.

At first search engine optimization may seem like a scary world full of big words like web crawlers, PageRank, Meta tags, and algorithms. You most likely never heard of any of these things before.

A quick internet search of the world algorithm doesn’t help; all you got was a printout of strange symbols and numbers arranged in complex algebraic equations.

Sit back, take a deep breath, and try to relax.

Search engine optimization is a lot simpler then you might think. Here’s some technical terms:

• PageRank is simply the program Google designed to search, index, and rank it registered webpage’s. PageRank operates on a link analysis algorithm. PageRank is credited for Google’s incredible success.
• Web crawlers are tools search engines use to browse the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. When web crawlers are browsing websites they are looking for algorithms.
• Meta tags are special HTML tags that provide information to about a web page. Meta tags are written directly into the title tag, keywords, description and other “under the page” locations,  and are only visible to the search engine.

The reality of search engine optimization is that you can start to optimize your website without any knowledge at all of the technical stuff involved in search engine optimization.

Simply, the very first step in designing a website that is going to be well ranked by the search engines is to create a content rich site.

What this means is that you must enter as much information about your product into your website as you possibly can.

Fill your site with keywords that will attract the web crawler’s attention based around your product or service, and you can’t go wrong.

Search engine optimization is the art and science of making websites attractive to the internet’s search engines. The first step in successfully achieving stellar search engine optimization is to lure search engine’s web crawlers to your website. Web crawlers are computer programs that the search engines use gather data and index information from the websites. The information the web crawlers gather is used to determine the ranking of a webpage.

One of the fastest ways to hamper a web crawler is to construct a website that has frames. Most search engines have crawlers that can’t penetrate the frames, if they can’t get into a webpage to read it then that webpage remains unindexed and unranked. Two search engines, Google and Inktome, have web crawlers that are capable of penetrating frames. Before submitting your website to a search engine do some research and find out if they have a crawler that is incapable of penetrating any frames.

If you have written frames into your URL it will probably be worth your effort to go back and rewrite your URL’s. Once you have rewritten your URLs you might be surprised to find that the new addresses are easier on humans as well as web crawlers, the frameless URLs are easier to type in documents as links and references.

Once you have rewritten your URL’s it is time to start submitting your website to search engines. Some webmasters like to use an automated search engine submission service. If you decide to go with the submission service you should be aware that there is likely to be a fee involved, the minimum fee is typically $100 dollars. This price should keep a few URLs on the search engines for a year, but for long term results you need to go beyond search engine submission services and develop your own search engine friendly site. Other webmasters like to avoid big fees by submitting their website to individual search engine on their own, but this can take a lot of time.

Once your webpage is submitted to a search engine you need to sit down and design a crawler page or more explicitly a site map. A crawler page is a webpage that contains nothing else expect links to every single page of your website. Use the title of each page as the as the link text. This will also give you some extra keywords that will help improve the ranking the crawlers assign to your website. Think of the crawler page as a site map to the rest of your website.

Typically, the crawler page won’t appear in the search results. This happens because the page doesn’t have enough text for the crawlers to give that individual page a high ranking, after all its nothing more then a portal to the rest of your site and your human users won’t need to use it. Don’t panic if it crawlers don’t instantly appear to index your website. There are a lot of websites available on the internet that need to be crawled, indexed, and then ranked. It can sometimes take up to three months for a web crawler to get to yours.

While this seems like an absolute bargain, you have to ask yourself the question, “Is this really worth it?”

The claims that they make are simple: they will increase your presence on the internet, so that when people search their directory they can find your business.

With the high number of online directories offering you an exclusive location on their internet real estate, I decided to test drive and see what would come up.

Example Post, PAINTER IN TOOWONG

So I hit my favorite Search Engine (Google) and typed in “painter in Toowong” to determine the results.

The first few results are the “paid” results,highlighted in yellow, right up the top. These are followed by Google Map locations of seven businesses before we get to the natural search engine results.

The first “organic” result takes me to a beautiful page, well optimised, and looks like it was developed as part of a Community guide.

However when you click to “Go to the main website” it takes you to a dead end. Looks like they dropped their domain, or the developers screwed up here ?! In any case, the business has just one sheet on the internet, and despite holding that lucrative position their customers are turned away if they want more information.

Further, if you click around the (makeshift?) website there is a location page, but the location of the business isn’t in Toowong at all ! It’s in Clayfield.

http://www.painter-toowong.websyte.com.au/site.cfm?/painter-toowong/1/

So now we’ve got a business listing that comes up in the highest organic result, but advertising in the wrong location, on a website platform that appears to be a makeshift website.

Oh sorry, this is infuriating.

If this was MY business I’d be asking a lot of questions from my web design company…

Back to Google, I’m searching down the list to see if I can find an actual painting company in Toowong.

The next result is a free listing in True Local – Ken Bells Painting. On that page there is a phone number and Google map – along with other business listings for painters in nearby suburbs.

There’s no explanation about who Ken Bell is, where he works, what his prices are, what paint he uses, or the level of experience he has. He’s quite fortunate to even get a listing on Google in such a high spot (#2). The reason for this is that his url contains the term “painter” and “Toowong”, and the title tag contains those search terms as well.

<title>KEN BELLS PAINTING SERVICE, Toowong, Qld, 4066</title>

Further to this, let’s look at the META tags, and in this case there are three: TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS.

You’ll notice that the search terms “painter” and “Toowong” are included in each of these META tags:

<meta name="title" content="KEN BELLS PAINTING SERVICE, Toowong, Qld, 4066" />
<meta name="description" content="KEN BELLS PAINTING SERVICE, Toowong, QLD. Full contact details for KEN BELLS PAINTING SERVICE including phone number, map and reviews. Listings by TrueLocal."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="KEN BELLS PAINTING SERVICE, Painters, Toowong, reviews recommendations local business search"/>

And lastly, the words “painter” and “Toowong” are on the small piece of text that co-exists on the web page.

Now if you are on Google’s page that shows these results, you’ll see that the number of competing Web Pages for these search terms is less than 10,000. So naturally there would not need to be any amount of “off-page” optimisation to get a #1 result in Google for these terms. All this has been accomplished with simple “on-page” optimisation.

Now if you’re a painter in Toowong and would like to get to #1 position, it’s quite easy!

There are several more things that you can do to out-rank and out-perform these few results — even without having to get into “off-page” optimisation. But that’s a topic for further discussion.

After this result was the Yellow Pages listing for Big Ben’s Paint Company, followed by Hot Frog – an online business directory.

So my question is … “Should You Add Your Business to Online Directories ?”

The short answer is YES, because they will help you get listed online.

But should you be paying $350 – $600 to be listed ? My answer is NO. Not one of the business listings that came up on Google’s first page were from a paid directory. Oh, some of you might argue with me and say that Yellow Pages is a paid service — and of course it is. My response is that if your business gets found on Google’s first page for a Yellow Pages listing, then there’s not much competition in the market! People will be searching for your business through Yellow Pages instead of doing a “Google Search”, but nice to know that it turns up.

If you really want to blitz your company in the search engines, then you’re going to need your own website. And you’re going to need to capture the right words and phrases in the important places of your website (both on page and under the page).

You can learn more about getting a number one listing in the Search Engines by attending one of Sure Fire Web’s training courses.

We give you the skills to confidently update your website to make it found in the Search Engines for the phrases that you need. Register your interest today and make sure you plan to attend an event in order to capture your share of the market !