Search Engine Optimization – Secrets of SEO

Getting traffic to your site doesn’t have to be hard.

Of course getting high rankings in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) takes time & energy but the results can be fourfold and last for years to come!

Search Engines Explained

I understand that many of you are coming from different levels of knowledge, some of you know little to nothing about ranking in the SERPS, some of you have a little knowledge but not enough to DOMINATE and the rest of you probably know enough about SEO to rank high for certain keywords.

With that said I want to cover the basics for that first group and as you go through this and other posts on SEO you will feel the “snowball effect”.

This is where you will constantly pick up new ideas and you’ll have all the knowledge you need to DOMINATE the SERPS.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically performing small tasks on and to your website so that the search engine spiders can crawl (look over) your site so they can include it in their directory, this is also known as getting indexed.

A spider is a robot that the search engines use to scour the web and check millions of millions of websites at super speeds.

Since there are millions of sites being built each day, there is no way you or any company can keep up with a task such as that.

These spiders index and sort web pages by relevance, so your web page shows up in the search engines when it is appropriate for the keyword you are targeting.

All activity on the web starts with a keyword!

People get on the internet to search for something and they generally go to the search engines to find this information.

When a topic is searched in the search engines the most relevant sites will show up first! These sites have optimized their web pages to show up first in the SERPS. Web pages with the TOP rankings get all the traffic for absolutely NO cost!

Most prospects/searchers only look at the TOP 3 results of any search engine listing! So you can’t be dangling at the bottom of the results page expecting to get traffic!

Now that we know how your web page shows up in the search engines it’s important to understand what an algorithm is. Well Wikipedia says…

“An algorithm is a finite sequence of instructions, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, often used for calculation and data processing. It is formally a type of effective method in which a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task…”

So basically this is saying that the search engines critique your sites based on certain criteria to see where it will rank in their results. Some of these criteria include:

1. Location & Frequency of keywords on your web page

2. Amount of links pointing to your site

3. How your website is structured

4. How relevant & unique your content is

What is Pagerank?

I felt it necessary to include this because it plays an important role when you begin building links. I think Wikipedia is much better at explaining things, so here is the definition from Wikipedia:

“Pagerank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”

A website can have a pagerank of 1 – 9; obviously the higher the pagerank the better! When you’re finding a site to link to yours it is important to find those links that have high pagerank (PR).

Major Search Engines

When doing your search engine optimization you want to focus your efforts on the search engines that will bring in the most traffic. Obviously Google is going to be the #1 contender!
Below is the percentage amount of search traffic that the TOP 3 search engines receive:

Google = 61%
Yahoo = 30%
MSN = 9%

As you can see Google is crushing its competitors, Yahoo only receives half as much traffic as Google does.

I recommend to focus all your SEO efforts on Google because not only do they have the most traffic but once you show up in their results the other search engines will start catching on and you will get traffic from them also.