What is SEO?

ROLCAM · Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 2:49 am Post subject: What is SEO?

What is SEO?

by Jared Blake

Many people ask me, what exactly is SEO? SEO is the abbreviation for search engine optimization. SEO consists of many techniques, that you apply to your website to help influence the search engines to not only rank your site with a higher ranking, but more importantly to rank the keywords you have carefully chosen that are relevant to your site, to list higher in the search engine listings. The bottom line here is to drive more visitors or traffic to your website, in order to increase your potential long-term customer base and profits. It will not be enough to build a website, and submit it to the search engines, then sit back and wait in hope that visitors will come. Trust me from experience, nobody will come. Building a website is just one of the many jobs you will encounter in working towards a successful and profitable internet business.

If an internet visitor is searching for Nike golf shoes and your website sells Nike golf shoes, you would want your website's listing to appear somewhere around the first two pages of listings on the major search engines. Currently on Google there are 1,960,000 listings for Nike golf shoes. Studies show, that most web searchers rarely look beyond the first or second page of listings. Therefore, it is critical your site listing is somewhere on the first few pages of the search engines, Otherwise, your site's listing will become a lost speck of dust in the vast internet highway.

You must find ways to drive customers to your site, if you are going to have any chance in making profits from your internet business. SEO (search engine optimization) is the sum of techniques you apply to your website in order to make this happen. Many factors are involved in SEO. You must do well in all SEO factors, in order to get the highest possible rankings for your website listings.

Currently the three major search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Google is currently considered the "Big Daddy" of the search engines, with millions of searches conducted daily. Google also provides primary and secondary search results for many of the other internet search engines. It would be very beneficial if your website were to rank high on the Google search engine.

In SEO, we are concerned with the natural or organic search results provided by the search engines at no cost to the website owner. This is different from a pay per click campaign that involves bidding and paying for website traffic. Website owners may want to utilize pay per click campaigns along with organic results, or until the organic SEO techniques are providing you with the desired level of traffic. Of course all this will depend on the budget you have allocated towards website promotion.

Here is an incomplete list, a non-comprehensive list of some of the basic factors involved in SEO: onpage optimization which includes, keyword targeting, writing search engine friendly code, title tag and description meta tag, keyword placement, keyword density, relevant content, H1 and H2 header tags. Offpage optimization which includes, link popularity, reciprocal or back links, inbound or one-way links, anchor text with keywords. Other factors to consider are articles, blogs, podcasts, understanding and using robots.txt, submitting your site to the key search engines, converting your visitors into buyers, and many more factors are involved in SEO.

Hopefully this quick overview will provide you with a better understanding of "What is SEO."
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Roland Camilleri

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Sydney , Australia.

nieves22 · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 10:22 am Post subject:

Goood. Thank you for your post.
and when is your lesson 2?
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ROLCAM · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 11:06 am Post subject: Hyphens vs Underscores

Hyphens vs Underscores

by Jared Blake in SEO Alerts

In my recent seo research I now realize Google recognizes hyphens as dividers in image names, urls, and body content and ignores underscores. The underscore is not considered a divider (separator) by Google. So use hyphens not underscores in order for the search engines to recognize your keywords. Also keep your urls under 30 characters as it may be problematic for search engines to crawl and index them.

For more info on dashes vs underscores, check out Matt Cutts blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
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nieves22 · Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 8:37 am Post subject:

Thank you ROLCAM!
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ROLCAM

Google’s maximum allowed url’s in robots.txt?

by Jared Blake in SEO Info
I went searching for the answer to this question and the only thing I found was a comment on Matt Cutt’s blog in 2006 by a user stating he read somewhere inside Google sitemaps that the standard only allows 2000 characters. I don’t believe this to be the case now, as most of my files have been found and disallowed by Google and because of my recent site restructure, I currently have 4394 characters in my robots.txt file. Does anyone out there have the exact answer on this? I will try to post the question again to Matt Cutts.
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ROLCAM

New ways of learning - RSS explained in plain English.

by Jared Blake in SEO Info.

Ok, I know this is posted all over the place on other blogs but it is too good not to post here. Even if it means my blog goes into the supplemental index again. Smile

If all seo and website traffic techniques were explained in plain simple English like this. We would all be experts in no time at all. I’m a big believer in the “keep it simple” theory. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.
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Roland Camilleri

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ROLCAM

Trackbacks Explained – Create more links for traffic using trackbacks.

by Jared Blake in Blog Traffic Tactics

Trackbacks are a great way to generate fresh new content on your own blog while actually making a comment regarding somebody else’s blog post.
Here’s the deal, you have found a great post on somebody else’s blog (preferably a similar topic to your own blog) that you would like to make a comment on. Rather than making the comment directly on their blog site you decide to use the trackback strategy and basically post the comment on your own site linking back to the original bloggers post. Pretty cool right?
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Roland Camilleri

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Sydney , Australia.

ROLCAM

Time Saving Tools for Web 2.0 Social Marketing.

by Jared Blake in Web 2.0 Tools

So you want to be a social media marketing specialist but you’re working 40 to 60 hour weeks at your regular full time job and all these accounts like: digg, stubmleupon, newsvine, del.ici.ous and the hundreds of other web 2.0 sites, are just too time consuming for you keep up with. Here are a couple of must have tools to give you a fighting chance at keeping up with this social media marketing madness while still leaving you time left over to spend with your friends and family.

1. Web2Submitter - This is a first of it’s kind tool developed by Jack Humphrey and Brandon Hall over at ACS (Authority Site Center). This tool is going to save you a bunch of time helping you organize and submit your articles to the major social marketing sites in a very concise and efficient way. Check out this video (Web2Submitter Video) and you will quickly see that this is a must have tool at a generous price.

2. RoboForm - I log in and out of over a hundred different sites daily. RoboForm makes it so easy and fast to securely log into sites and fill out forms. You will be kicking yourself if you don’t already utilize this timesaving tool. Check out our quick video on RoboForm.

I sincerely hope this information and these tools are helpful in your own efforts with web 2.0 and social media marketing.
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Roland Camilleri

Moderator

Sydney , Australia.

ROLCAM · Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 1:23 pm Post subject: WordPress Tips ****** part 6.

Customize your permalinks for better SEO.

by Jared Blake in WordPress Tips

Take your blog to the next level by customizing your permalink structure for more search engine friendly permalinks (your blog post URL’s). This is assuming you have a WordPress blog on your own domain. The out of box WordPress setting for permalinks is set to default. This setting will create permalinks with the ?P=123 type structure, this doesn’t help give you a competitive edge with the search engines that a custom post name structure will give you. A custom post name structure will utilize the title post name for your URL’s. Your post titles normally include your keywords. This in turn will help your cause for better page rankings with the search engines. The following site: tubetorial.com has a real cool video tutorial on making this permalink change. It’s called “How to Get More Search Engine Traffic With One Simple Tweak”

CAUTION: This permalink structure change is intended for newly installed WordPress blogs with little or no postings and is not recommended for well established good ranking blogs. The owner of a well established blog would have to setup many 301 redirects in order to avoid getting “Error 404 - file not found” errors and possibly loosing hard earned SERP’s and page rankings.

Here are a few SEO key terms defined:
CMS = Content Management System
SEM = Search Engine Marketing
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
SERP’s = Search Engine Results Pages
SES = Search Engine Strategies
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Roland Camilleri

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Sydney , Australia.

hotcelebs · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 7:02 am Post subject:

Great thread. There is so much to learn but threads like this really do help some of us out.

Thanks
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SeekingVeritieS · Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 6:46 pm Post subject:

much to learn about SEO, thanks.
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