Search Engine Optimization Strategies

Getting Search Engine Optimization Right is the title of an article aimed at the legal community however, the information contained is relevant to non-legal businesses. The article reveals that it is contrary to Google policy to buy or sell links for the purpose of improving the ranking of one's own site with Google. According to the article the top three positions for search results account for about 70 per cent of total clicks. That came as a surprise to me.

Search engine owners have a natural incentive to please their customers. Therefore websites consumers find more useful will accrue ranking benefits.. What I found to be very informative was the description of how search engines go about evaluating the content of web pages. The term keyword density is useful because it refers to the frequency with which keywords or phrases appear. Keywords are counted and weighted a little more heavily when they appear in the title of a page or in the URL.

But what else goes into ranking? Links. How many other websites link to you and how significant are these sites? As the author pointed out the New York Times website will be thought of as more important than the website of an obscure individual.

Search engine optimization strategy is an important issue for businesses with websites and the linked article makes some valuable points relevant to SEO.

Searches: Keywords and Relevancy

There is useful information to be obtained from the article Ten Tips for Optimizing a Web Page for Search Engines. A linked subsection of it, 2. Incorporate the Keywords in Your Site's Content, is the focus of this blog entry.

Including the right keywords within a website page is important in determining how a search engine will respond to it. Will a search engine determine that a webpage is relevant to a search query? Here are some factors singled out in the linked article:

* Higher significance is afforded to what appears first.

* 250 words of text is considered a minimal benchmark for relevancy.

* Be natural and keep within a two to three keyword strategy.

Search Engines

'Starting an Online Business for Dummies', by Shannon Belew and Joel Elad is recommended Wiley Publishing, Inc. (658.872).

The following is useful information related to submitting a site to the Google search engine.

"1. Go to www.google.com/addurl.html
2. In the URL box, enter the full address of your website's home page.
3. In the Comments box, enter a one-sentence keyword description of your Web site.
4. Type the squiggly word shown in the box that's displayed.
5. Click the add URL button."

(pages 456-457)

Other search engine submittal addresses:

MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
AltaVista: http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl
InfoUSA: http://dbupdate.infousa.com/dbupdate/index.html
(see page 459)