Isha Global Search Engine Optimization.

	Search Engine Optimization
	Why do people look up websites? Usually to help them make important professional decisions. Will you entrust yourself to a doctor who looks unprofessional and whose clinic is shoddy. make sure the page looks professional, has usable navigation and is complete. This check is important for several reasons: Remember you will eventually be hand submitting this page to the directories. Unlike search engines, directories use real human beings to review sites. If the site isn't visually appealing to a human editor, it won't do well. The second reason you want a good looking page is that assuming you do well in the search engines, this is where many folks will enter your site, and first impressions last. If the site looks unprofessional, they aren't going to have the confidence in you to entrust you with their credit card. Quality content on the page or in the site is important. The old saying, "content is king" is still true. Good content increases the value of your site. It is a reason for people to return to your site and to link to your site. Search engines and directories love good content and reward it with higher rankings. If your site doesn't have some, add it. Step Two - Look for spider traps. A spider trap is anything that would prevent a spider from crawling your page or site. It includes dynamic pages, pages containing no readable text or splash pages, no text links, password protection, or frame sites without good noframes sections. If a spider can't crawl through your site it will leave, and your site won't get indexed. Part of the SEO's job is to look over a site and identify anything that could potentially hurt the site in the search engines. I also look for anything that might be considered spam by a search engine. What is spam? I define it as any practice that you do that you wouldn't want to openly discuss with a representative from a search engine. I'd rather err on the side of conservative optimization, than be banned. The most common "spam" I see is accidental. A Webmaster innocently does something such as using white font in a colored table, when he happens to also have a page with a white background. From a search engine's point of view this is spamming because he has "hidden text." You aren't allowed to have text the same color as your page background. Another item to look for in this step is general page layout. Does the page have multiple nested tables or long JavaScript code that push all the content way down the page? This can reduce your relevancy score. This situation happens frequently when the SEO isn't part of the design phase of the Web site.

Step Three- Review the keyword selection.

This is the most important step in optimizing a page for the search engines. This is also where most people, including many SEOs, make mistakes. You can get all the top ten rankings in the world with unusual keywords, but you won't see any traffic unless you choose a popular keyword.

Fortunately, there are tools to help you in determining how popular a keyword is - they are called keyword popularity tools. Keyword popularity tools show you how many times a certain keyword phrase has been entered over the last month. Most of them give you examples of related words too. You can compare different keywords and see how they rate in popularity. The theory is that a keyword that is popular as a search term will translate into traffic on your site. Increased traffic usually means increased sales. Therefore, good keywords equate to increased revenue.

Be careful here; don't pick keywords that aren't appropriate for your site (and risk being banned). Also avoid words that aren't focused enough to bring you targeted traffic. Single words are generally too broad. Keyword phrases of two or three words generally work better. Why? Searchers may start with a single word and when they see unfocused results, they quickly refine their search to several words. Some recent studies show that most searchers now use three terms in their queries.

Also be careful to keep a lid on the number of keywords you use per page. Too many keywords will dilute your relevancy. If you have more than 20 keywords in your Meta keyword tag, you need to pare back to a more focused list.

Step Four - Get a baseline reading on where your site currently stands in the search engines.

Enter your keyword into a search engine. Does your site come up? This can be a tedious task if you're checking multiple engines. I recommend using a tracking tool to quickly check multiple engines and directories at once. If your site is already at the top of the search results, whatever you're doing seems to be working.

Step Five - View the HTML source code.

It's back to the basics. If you don't do the fundamentals correctly, advanced tricks won't help you much. Look at the keywords you've selected and make sure the keywords are in the strategic places where search engines look. At a minimum, keywords should be in:

Title tag, Meta description and keyword tag, Alt tags, Heading tags, Link Text
Prominent positions throughout the body Also make sure the site is optimized beyond the home page. Many people optimize this one page and copy the title and meta tags to every other page on their site. Customize each page individually like it was a separate entry way into your site and only use a few keywords per page.

Step Six - Check the link popularity of the site.

Link popularity is considered in every major search engine's ranking algorithm. It's not something you can ignore. Building link popularity needs to become a habit.

In many engines you can type: link:http://domain-name and you can get a link count for that particular engine.

Step Seven - Submission to search engines.

If you have prepared your site and followed the steps above, you need to make sure your site is included in the databases of the search engines and directories. If you type in the name of your domain in a search engine query box and your site doesn't come up, you can assume that you're not in the database. If you've modified your site considerably you should also submit your site to invite the spider to revisit soon.

Okay, this is really part of Step Seven, but most people think they can submit one day and the spider will come the next day. Not so. Search engines are in high demand, so there is a lag time from when you submit your site to when the spider actually visits. This can be anywhere from a week to a few months depending on the search engine.

If you have been practicing patience and don't see your site in the search engine database, it may be time to resubmit or tweak your page a bit and resubmit.

Step Eight - Hand submission to directories.

We recommend hand submission to directories. Directories like Yahoo, Open Directory, and Looksmart are big themselves, but combined with their partner relationships with search engines, they are huge. Many directories have recognized their self-importance and now charge to bestow the honor of having your site reviewed.

Step Nine - Maintenance Stage.

Search engine optimization is definitely not a "do it once and forget" activity. This might be a good reason to farm the work out to many of the excellent search engine optimization firms. The reality is that you must continually track and adjust your pages. The rules the search engines use to rank a page change constantly. It takes a major time commitment to keep abreast of these changes. What worked last year could get you banned this month.

Optimization maintenance translates into "tracking and tweaking" pages. Search engines change their ranking algorithms frequently, so a technique that works one week might get you in trouble the next week.

Step Ten - Track traffic to your site.

Most log file analysis tools or hit counters can tell you how much traffic you're getting from search engines and which keywords are generating the most hits. If your log file software doesn't tell you this, get one that does!

Let's assume your starting to see top ten rankings in the search engines. Now you need to determine if the high rank is bringing you traffic. People assume a top ranking automatically means high traffic. But it's really traffic that matters, not high search engine ranking alone, and high rankings only bring traffic if the rankings are for good keywords.
Increased traffic is the real result of a successful optimization process, not a top ten ranking. If you're not seeing a jump in your traffic, you need to re-evaluate your keywords and cycle back through the optimization cycle.

Summary:

Search engine optimization is a multi-step continual process. As long as search engines change rules and new Web sites come into existence, search engine optimization will be necessary. It's not cheating, it's helping search engines do their job more efficiently. Optimization takes a lot of time and patience (expect to wait at least three months before you see changes in some engines). It also requires a skilled knowledgeable person who spends a non-trivial amount of time staying up to date with what the search engines are doing. People often get discouraged in the process. Don't - search engine optimization pays for itself in increased revenue. It is worth the time and trouble.