Getting Search Engine Love in Three Easy Steps

By: David Badurina
Submitted: 2007-01-17 13:47:07
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Businesses don’t create an online presence just so they can be ignored. Websites are created specifically to attract new customers and reach a broader market.

But once your website is done, how to do you get the masses of online consumers to your little corner of the internet? The process of becoming popular online falls into the realm of a mysterious, important-sounding thing called Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”).

The concept behind SEO is basic. It is the process of changing and marketing your website to position yourself higher in search engine results so that people looking for your products will actually find you.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo get searched millions of times every day. You want your website to be listed as high up in those results as possible. The higher you place (or “rank”), the more likely someone looking for your product or services will find you. Generally, if your listing is past the top 20 results, your website is being ignored.

Using SEO techniques will make those finicky search engines give your website a higher ranking, increasing the traffic to your website, which in turn increases your profit.

Now that you know what SEO is, and know that you need it – how do you do it? That’s where things get a little more complicated.

There are countless changes you can make to alter how search engines perceive your website. We can’t cover them all here, so we’ll stick to three basic factors of SEO: relevancy, popularity, and fresh content.

1) Relevancy – Write like you speak. If you sat down to have coffee with a salesperson who makes wooden carvings of bears, and all they managed to get out of their mouth was, “handmade wood carvings, bear carvings, carvings of bears, handmade bear carvings, bears carved into wood,” and on and on, you wouldn’t be particularly interested in them. The same is true for search engines. Don’t stuff your website with keywords. Google, MSN, and Yahoo might actually penalize you for doing this. Write like you’re having a conversation with someone in your living room.

2) Popularity – Don’t link to everyone on the internet. If you own a store, you wouldn’t put all of your competitor’s promotional materials prominently on your shelves. Likewise, don’t link to them on your website. Instead, look for websites with similar subjects as yours and see if you can get them to link to you. Search engines are a lot like high school – it’s a big popularity contest. They favor the Prom Queen. Be the Prom Queen! Get cozy with popular sites that have to do with your topics and get them to link to you.

3) Fresh Content – Search engines can’t stand websites that aren’t updated at least periodically. If you neglect your website, not adding any new content for months at a time, don’t expect search engines to pay much attention to you. Why should search engines direct visitors to an outdated site while plenty of fresh, current sites exist? Make sure your copyright is up-to-date and try writing some articles or posts to show that you have fresh, current content.

By making sure your site is well written, getting linked by others, and kept up-to-date, you’re well on your way to getting ranked well with search engines. There’s no generic roadmap that every website can follow to help them rank well, but one thing is certain: If your website doesn’t rank high in the search engines, someone else’s will.

David Badurina is the President of Blue Moose Technology, LLC in Littleton, NH. He uses these Search Engine Marketing techniques to help his own website rank higher than Microsoft for some of their own terminology.

Blue Moose Technology specializes in database-driven website design with an emphasis on clean and effective search engine marketing. If you need a more popular website, contact Blue Moose Technology today!

Article source: Expert Articles