What is Search Engine Optimization?
Current mood: Search Engine Optimization
Category: Search Engine Optimization Web, HTML, Tech

A Quick 101 on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search Engine Optimization (otherwise known as SEO) is the art of working with websites to get them ranked high in search engines like Google and Yahoo.

If you go to Google and search for "Free Games" you'll get a page showing the first 10 sites out of over a billion results.

Have you ever wondered how Google orders those Billion pages to find who should be #1 and who should be number 1 billion?

It's a mathmatical forumla that decides this order. SEO's try to get websites high rankings by doing mainly 2 things.

The first thing is making sure that the phrases that you're trying to rank for appear on your web pages. It's nearly impossible to rank for phrases that don't at least appear on your pages.

The second thing you'll want to do is to get other websites to link to your site. Every other website that links to your web pages is counted as a vote for your site - the more votes (links) the higher you're going to rank in the search engines.

As far as search engine ranking factors go "Who links to you" is the largest part of the ranking factor. Let's look at a few of the items that search engines look at when analyzing who link to you (also called "BackLinks").

Then engines look at the words used to link to your site. For example, if I were trying to rank my blog higher for something like "internet marketing blog" then I'd try to get other people to link to my site using that phrase.

This is because the engines look at the words used to link to your site (see my example in the paragraph above). What I did is basically helped to give my blog a boost in rankings for the phrase "internet marketing blog".

Not all votes/links are equal. The engines look at the people who link to you, and they see how many people link to them. For example, if site A and site B both link to you, and site A has 10 people who link to them, and site B has 1000 people link to them, then site B will count as a bigger vote than site A's vote/link.

Another thing the search engines look at, when they're seeing who link to you, is what are the pages about that link to you. For example, if pages about internet marketing link to my blog, then that will help me more than if sites about cooking links to my blog.

So that about sums up my 101 on the topic of search engine optimization. I hope you liked it. If you want more in debth tips on SEO then here's some great resources as well:

One of the leading portals on internet marketing is Search Engine Watch.
Aaron Wall wrote a great book called "SEO Book" that's a great book about SEO.
Webmasterworld is a forum about internet marketing.
I've also got a blog about internet marketing that you're free to read as well.

------------------

More information on Jim Boykin

9:33 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment